@@unbanrofellos5786 cause in this context, you're now more involved, I think, and it also creates an air of suspense? Like, you came with this purpose....but this is chill, so you are waiting, you listen. will you be convinced to spare him? Like, it takes it from being a youtube video filmed in a slightly unusual place, if cozy, chill place, to this bizarre scenario, and things are playing out in an unexpected way *given* the unusual scenario.Like, Hey, why is he chilling here, all relaxed, giving you his hot takes? Has he accepted his fate, and spilling out his feelings for all to see? Does he hope to change your mind by being calm and accepting you, the assassin into his home, and treating you like a friend, regaling you with his personal thoughts? *will* you take him as a friend and spare him?
I mean, to be fair even Beowulf thought it was a bad idea to fight a dragon without weapons despite the dragon being (technically) unarmed. And he was right.
@@spiceyicey as a fighter I can Slow down time, getting in multiple swings mopre then any other Martial character can. with the limited ability to get mutliple actions done in the span of 6 seconds. and can cause wounds to suddenly close on the spot, these abilities are availble to me again after sitting down for about an hour.
see my "issue" (although its not much of one since you know its make believe) is that functionally monks dont make sense, like how if you have a bad guy holding someone at knife point and then someone speaks up and says that knives only deal 1d4 damage. in the game that person should survive the attack probably despite getting a knife to the throat but thats not how itll probably end up going because that doesnt make sense. i view monks similarly to this situation game whise theyre cool and fun but when you actually try to picture what is happening it doesnt add up. like i said i dont feel to strong about this because dnd is make believe, but its still my view point non the less
@@tacolord2561 what doesn't make sense? He just punches really really hard. It's nothing different then any other weapon, except it's called a monk. It's just a human with good spirituality who trained in martial arts.
I agree, wildshape is stupid. "Your turn wizard. What do? Ok. Thief, you're up. What do? Cool. Fighter, what do? Cool. Bear, what do? Of course you do."
Also.... A longsword is quite possibly the worst choice against a dragon, realistically... Longswords are designed to fight humanoids, using such a weapon against a dragon is dumb. The dragon might not even bother fighting back. It's not just dragons, many dnd monsters would be essentially immune to sword strikes... If you're going to call realism in DnD, you should just discard the idea of ever using a longsword.
@@kapitan19969838 Seeing as how D&D Monks use ki to empower their attacks, I still don't see how it's any different. In D&D the Monk is basically the "create your own shonen anime/martial arts movie protagonist" class. In fact, most monk subclasses basically mimic a particular show or movie: Astral Self: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (part 3 and onward) Drunken Master: Drunken Master Four Elements: Avatar: The Last Airbender (not an anime per say, but it's an anime-inspired series) Kensai: Rurouni Kenshin Long Death: Not sure. Kinda has some Bleach-esque themes to it but it doesn't actually match anything mechanically. Mercy: Another way of playing a healbot without playing a cleric. Open Hand: Fist of the North Star, One Punch Man, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (parts 1 and 2), most martial arts movies Shadow: Naruto Soul Knife: Zamasu from Dragon Ball Z Sun Soul: Everyone else from Dragon Ball Z Tranquility: Another healbot Anyway, once you take into account both the mechanics and lore of the Monk class, you can definitely see that they aren't just some average joe trying to punch things.
@@VestedUTuber Impressive, but it all seems kind of lame. Like this whole ''ki'' idea was created for the sole purpose of justifying Monk's existence in D&D
In one game we were faced with a bored witch who said she'd help us if any of us could overcome her magical defenses to move her from where she was standing with any form of magic. After several failed attempts, the monk walked up and said "I cast fist." And decked her in the face with his ki enhanced fist. After a fairly lengthy debate of the party bard convincing the witch that ki does in fact qualify for the definition of magic, she begrudgingly agreed to help us.
“It’s dumb that you can punch a dragon” It’s dumb that anyone without extensive magic power could stand a chance against a dragon, it’s a giant lizard that breathes napalm, so what’s your point?
For some reason it isn't pointed out more, but every character in DnD is magical. Why can a banneret fighter perform an aoe heal without a spell or divine assistance? Or perform 8 powerful attacks at level 20 within 6 seconds? Why can a rogue dodge all damage from a fireball that fills an entire enclosed space? Why can a barbarian survive a fall after reaching terminal velocity and get back up like it was nothing? Why does everyone, no matter their level of mastery, have a 1 in 20 chance of failing spectacularly AND succeeding profoundly (seriously though imagine living in a world like that)? It's because everyone in the setting is magical. I don't know what the official universal mechanics are, but everyone has inherent magic that is refined and increased through choosing a class and leveling up. Same thing with how skill checks work, particularly charisma. Everyone is some flavor of low end reality warper (except high level casters) and that is why all these things, in the world of dnd, are reasonable.
@@MonochromaticPrism This. This is something that is a really huge inonsistency in D&D. For me it creates a ludo-narrative disonance. To explain simply, the things that are implied by rule set and core gameplay are usually so different than the narrative of the game/campaign that it brakes my immersion. Rules often imply that every character is "magical" in some degree. Adding overabundance of magic items and artifacts etc. and suddenly im starting to think like "Sooo... why are there peasants? Farmers? Blacksmiths?" If getting your hands on a magical item sometimes requires so much effort as killing a bunch of goblins, climbing a mountain etc... why isnt this community fixated on it? Why would anyone choose to live in this world as a lowly pig herder instead of wandering the world in search of power? And we can go even further. How is it possible for example, that this king... who is not a magic user... not a skilled fighter, is still a king? You want to tell me that for his entire life, in his kingdom of thousands of people, there was noone who would say "Hey, if we use this magical ring that supposedly is in this cavern, along with Bob's magical charisma, we can overthrow him" This also creates a problem that, nothing is scary, nothing is particularly hard. In first CR campaign you could see this issue, altought not so evident at first glance, and never named. When main characters aquired the means of teleportation, along with 2 (!) strongholds, nothing was a really huge deal. Oh, we have a problem, we are bloodied etc. aaaand we have a really important news that, if late, can lead to a catastrophe? Well, good that that at least 2 of our characters can either teleport us thousands of kilometers away, or communicate on those distances. And then we get to the powercreep issue. That sometimes the group gets so powerful so quickly, that the challenges you have to prepare are ridiculous. And you get to a situation that in a particular area you have barbarians, giants, dragons and manticores (all seeing themselves as apex predator) living so close to each other that its mindboggling. Also, the overpowered items. I am more than convinced that (SPOILER FOR CR CAMPAIGN 1) throwing Percys turbo-omega-op gun into the acid, or destroying the blade that Grog used was NOT a pure out of the blue player choices. Those items brought a huge imbalance of power in a very short notice, and i can bet that it was planned between Matt Mercer and others to destroy them. Not hating on Mercer, still amazing narrative skills, but you can often see that he stumbles when it comes to planing the huge encounters. Y know, a group that has problems with dealing with a group of goliaths, wiped the floor with a dragon. Maaan thats a long comment.
"Ugh, monks are dumb, it's so unrealistic. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to ride off on my pegasus to cast fireball at this demon from the fifth dimension."
I honestly dont get how people think swords are THAT MUCH more realistic than punches, specially talking about dragon. The thing's got teeth bigger than most swords
2 things: they are magic punches and usually magic weapons when you are at a level to fight big dragons. So they do a lot more damage than a mundane punch or slash. Further, there is a reason gargantuan monsters have a ton of hp. A single blow won't slay it and it takes cumulative damage to bring it down.
I had a DM who didn't like ME personally playing monks. Because I was the only monk player he had ever met that knew the rules to disarming and sundering objects. First game I played with them It was 3.5 I had just joined a lvl 5ish game in progress and we were going up against a big meaty armored mini boss with a obviously magical mace. I would like to disarm him. DM just looks at me squints, "is it going to be like that?" Me, "I can read rules."
“7.” “You’ve contracted “red dragons crotch fire” take 3d6 fire damage focused on the groin after every long rest, or once every three short rests.” “…” “Now roll again.” “…2.” “Oh, so you’ve also got… oh no, “tadpole taint”, get ready to figure out how mindflayer/player-race hybrids who can survive off of brains or regular food are born.” “But I’m a male?” “I know.” “…Oh dear.”
rofl y first ever tabletop game i was a half-orc in an elven restrictive city. I went around in full armor, gloves hood and full face mask at all times
@thunderdrae Oh, I read over that part for some reason, whoops. And, yeah, that’s fair. I guess I kinda just assumed they hated dwarves more than they actually do. (Edit: fixed the part where I used the same pronouns for two different things)
(+TidalShores) In D&D, how much elves hate dwarves is based off of edition, I believe. In older editions, there was more of a hatred between the two like in LotR, but 5e seems to be more like an ideological disagreement between heavily LG and CG societies, from the impression I got. Except for sun elves, who hate everyone other than high elves and maybe eladrin.
Reason to why evocation has a lot of healing magic. Evocation creates energy of a certain type, be it fire, electricity, concussive etc. In DnD there's a plane of pure negative energy and a plane of pure positive energy. Evocation healing spells create energy similar to the energy on the plane of positive energy, and thus can heal people. Some healing spells were conjuration because you were teleporting energy directly from the plane of positive energy instead of creating it. Bottom line: this is super dumb and convoluted and it should have just been fucking necromancy.
@@XPtoLevel3 Evocation takes up way too much of the spotlight. I have no clue why spells such as light, tiny hut and more are evocation when other schools suit them far more.
Transmutation would also make more sense than evocation. Regenerate is already transmutation. Purify food/drink is, too. Also, transmuters can cast panacea using a philospoher stone. You're changing (transmuting) damaged cells into healthy ones.
"Yall should be exercising, after all those combats can are like 30 seconds thats not enough for a good cardio" thank you for giving me a new part for my drow ranger survivalist's daily routine
I feel like somebody hasn’t fought before. When it’s all out, you’re gonna find it’s a hell of a work out. It’s really hard to push your body that hard without the fight-or-flight motivation.
@DeruwynArchmage dude, its still not the same as a proper workout routine. Why do you think boxers/wrestlers/MMA fighters still train in the gym. Doesn't matter if you've got adrenaline going, a minute long fight isn't gonna do the same as deliberately working different muscle groups for an hour plus a day
@@theunloadedrpg1376 that’s not what I meant at all. (Also, I wasn’t actually meaning you specifically. And I very much was not meaning it as a dig. I apologize that I came across that way. That’s my fault.) I guess what I really meant is that the kind of “fight for your life” type of things gives you an extreme workout. It’s why boxers, who, as you rightly pointed out, work out a ton still get absolutely exhausted during a fight. And that’s not even true f.o.f. type thing anyway. Once they’re experienced, they’re not panicking anymore. It’s not really scary for them anymore, just competitive which isn’t the same level. When you think you’re gonna die, your body ends up removing a ton of your limiters that keep you from hurting yourself all the time. So now your muscles are pulling as hard as they can. They tear themselves and damage themselves in ways they normally wouldn’t, even for someone who trains a lot and has reduced the level of limitations below the levels that a sedentary person would have. So my point was that the extreme levels of damage that your body would cause in a terrifying situation would more than substitute for a regular workout, despite it’s brevity. At least afterwards, it’d be a bad idea to then go work out as your body would need time to repair. Regular exercise will reduce the amount of damage you’d take in those situations, reduce recovery time (healing, reabsorbing lactic acid, and returning to baseline resting heart rate), and make you far more effective when it happens. And the even more core point I was really trying to make is that no amount of exercise truly substitutes/prepares you for that level of exertion. You just can’t push your body that hard during a regular workout; and for very good reason, since you’d almost certainly injure yourself and not just stress your muscles (etc.) so that they respond by building up in preparation for future exertion.
Hot Take: Tools are wildly underused except for a few (such as Alchemy Supplies and Tinker's Tools). Nobody is going to take Potter's Tools as a proficiency unless it has something specifically to do with their backstory, and even then they'll likely never be able to use this proficiency in game as an adventurer.
I think one of the main things is that some people don't know that proficiency in a tool also comes with some passive bonuses. Or, at least, should come with MORE passive bonuses. For example, the Mason's tools allows the PC to deal double damage to nonmagical stone objects, as well as where to detect weaknesses in such a place. I think that's a really fun buff because there's a lot of stone stuff in DnD, and having an option to "break through a wall" is fun. I think tools should emphasize this a lot more than it does right now.
Healing magic works by conjuring positive energy. Evocation is the school of magic which commands, controls, and calls up energy. Necromancy has this narrow "life and death" energy niche. It's definitely an overlap.
@@pallydan893 @Ghost Ya Some healing magic does work like that, and those ones ARE transmutation. Like the 7th level transmutation healing spell, Regenerate. Other healing magic used to be necromancy. Back then inflict wounds and cure wounds were the same spell with an invert modifier. (Standard spell customization from back then makes 5e meta magic feel like an insulting joke.) At some point they started calling it not necromancy for absolutely no raison.
I'm playing a barbarian in my current campaign, and I told the DM that, "I'm not gonna specify this for every day, but assume that my character wakes up early and exercises for one or two hours" So now whenever he narrates everyone waking up, he says that at the crow of the aaracockra (we have one in the party that always crows like a rooster when the sun rises), the half-orc wakes up and does his early morning exercises
@@neog8029 My group actually has it as an official table rule that if anyone ever rolls a natural 20 for taxes, they successfully _get away_ with tax fraud and receive 1d100 gold from the IRS, regardless of whether or not they were actually trying to commit tax fraud. It hasn't come up yet, but our hopes are high.
A friend of mine had this really cool thing, he was a DM for 2 groups, one of which was playing an evil party. He made the two groups be in the same world, at some point when he was playing online, they even played at the same time, so they actually had a live battle. After that he told both groups, and it was really funny. The evil party betrayed the big bad guy, and took over the evil army. The evil player campaign ended due to some unfortunate deck of many things draws, but the other campaign is still going i think
@@creativedesignation7880 Oh, damn. He's right tho, positive energy in D&D heals living beings (and used to hurt undead too, but they changed that), and spells that use any kind of energy usually fall into the evocation category... _except_ for negative energy, which is so intimately linked to death and the undead that it falls into the necromancy category. There's a high chance you already knew all that, though.
Hot take: human fighters aren't boring; they're blank canvases upon which you can do absolutely anything with. If someone has made a human fighter and the character is boring, the root of the boring isn't in the race and class, it's the player.
They're not boring, they just suck compared to custom origin. Having darkvision is such a boon it completely overshadows being a pure human. I mean honestly, do you want to have to give up using a shield or a two handed weapon to carry a torch? On what planet is that considered optimal?
I’ve always thought that fighters are like plain oatmeal. It’ll keep you full till lunch like a breakfast food should, but it’s not very flavorful. However the lack of flavor means that it doesn’t conflict with the flavor of stuff you want to add to it, so you can mix in some berries, or cinnamon and sugar, or maple brown sugar and it’ll all work. Fighters have good mechanical weight to them, but are bland. You can add feats, an unusual race, a little spellcasting, a couple levels of multiclass, etc. to make them more flavorful and the fighter class doesn’t really disagree or conflict with any of it. Fighter is a class that is highly receptive to modification and additional flavor, which is why vhuman, the race most able to add in modifications and additional flavor is the most commonly played race among fighter players.
Realistic doesn't mean it can't be fantastic. However 5e is just not the system for people who enjoy realism in their fantasy games. Wounds recover overnight and barbarians can survive falls from orbit, among other crazy things. For harsher realism, they should try pathfinder 2e if they want something similar to D&D, or GURPS if they are willing to give something new a try to get all those harsh realism rules going (I actually love GURPS, it has a lot of optional rules depending on the style of game you want). 5e just isn't a one system fits all sort of game.
@@WolforNuva Pathfinder 2e can get pretty unrealistic in higher levels. Legendary athletics and acrobatics can let you climb smooth walls like a lizard and balance on a sword's edge.
“Monks can’t fit in dnd.” Fighter can hit someone ten times in three potential seconds. Wizards can bend reality to their whims. Dragons exist. Yeah monks are the most unrealistic thing *watches a real dude break bricks with bare hands
*nine times in six seconds Just wanted to correct that, since a game turn is six seconds and the highest number of attacks a fighter can get in one round is nine, four per action and one more from his bonus action. Other than that i fully agree with the point that reality has little bearing on D&D.
I like having a two-alignment-chart system as a guideline. One the player makes to show how the character perceives themselves, and the other the DM makes to show their effect on the people around them.
I see Alignment less as Restriction to the characters actions and more as a way to tracking them. Alignments should always change depending of a characters actions and development
I have a partymate who's a Half-Orc Bard. He was neutral good, but ironically as his name began to get more popular, he began to shift pretty dramatically. He didn't start as chaotic neutral, but it makes so much more sense when you accidentally convince the barkeep to kill his unenthusiastic wife; setting the tavern in heavy disarray and going on an adventure where a dragon inflates your ego. Coupled with the doubts he used to have about his playing ability, all this served to make him shift completely on the alignment scale. Likewise, just have your characters hold themselves to their own decisions. I think the only alignment-heavy focused class might be Order of the Crown-Paladin, but even then they're usually exercising correctness unless they're getting lessons on how to steal from their local Rogue or something. AND EVEN THEN, it's not like doing one semi-contradiction immediately makes the Paladin go "welp, guess I broke my oath".
"monks punching dragons is unrealistic" i like that this sentence can be taken down two ways. A) *they say as a half devil with magic powers from a pantheon of gods with their talking mimic animal companion* or *they say as a fighter or barbarian, taking down the creatures of eternal darkness and nighmares with flimsy medieval short swords or punches that hit harder because 'im angry'*
Splitting the party is also great in downtime. It makes sense that not every character would want to do the same thing in the town when the party is, for example, prepping before an adventure. Playing out, even just a little bit, what each party member does during free time can really help flesh out their character and give a much needed breather to the players and DM.
I love occasionally splitting the party. It’s really helped the characters in our campaign get some good heart-to-heart or funny dynamics. Seeing two characters interact one-on-one really adds a lot more depth to them. Just have it be occasional and not too disruptive.
Right? Like, sure a sword is sharper than mundane punches, but against something like a dragon it still probably ain't doin' shit. Good luck parrying a claw swipe from a claw that's as big as you are. Basically any attack from it that hits should "realistically" send you flying. After which you should need to pass a high DC fort save or have a severe concussion, and a further, lower DC save to avoid long-term minor brain damage. People who claim to want """realistic""" games have no idea what they're talking about.
"Human fighters are boring" Well let me introduce you to Magnus Burnsides, probably the best well known example on how you can make a human fighter interesting and engaging
Have fun carrying a torch through a dungeon rather than wielding a two handed weapon or a shield. After all, that's more fun than playing custom origin and having all the same benefits of a human player except you also have darkvision. Honestly, humans suck. The sooner you admit it the better off you'll be.
@@theraven5850 oooooor... you can say to the dm that you are holding the torch in your mouth, or ask a blacksmith in an rp centred session if you can buy a custom torch holder for on your shield. think creatively, cus thats how humans would think too
@@theraven5850 you do realize darkvision is *not* pure night vision, right? You still have a disadvantage on perception, your passive perception drops, and you can't discern color in the dark. This means enemies have an easier time using stealth against you, and traps are harder to detect. Darkvision races still benefit from torches and light spell. The rulings do not imply darkvision races just never need light. I'm tired of people ignorant in this concept that darkvision races are purely superior. It's beneficial, yes, because disadvantage on perception is better than no perception, but that's the only benefit of its perk. Youre still better off just using a light source. Again, it is *not* night vision. This is why humans are still a completely viable race. And they can get a feat, at that. If you want night vision, play a warlock and get Devil's Sight invocation.
@@kendromeda42 I thought it was because a bunch of people had already tried to kill grendel with weapons and it didnt work so he was just like "well weapons or no weapons it'll be the same outcome, it'll just come down to skill and strength, so Imma just strip down and fight him nude cause why not"
In terms of the "Rolling for stats" thing, the most recent game I'm in had this thing where we all rolled and contributed to a single list of six stats that we could then assign as we saw fit. It allowed us to roll for stats without having one play end up with multiple +3s at the outset while someone else (Probably me, I have _awful_ dice luck) got nothing above a 12. Also I feel that desire for more elemental spells so much. I have a character who is supposed to be a Lightning adept but the only Lightning cantrips are 1) A spell that pulls people into melee with you and 2) a melee spell attack. She's a Sorcerer with D6 HP, the last place she wants anyone to be is melee.
Spells I think are the best reason for homebrew. As long as you balance it to be on par with spells of its level it is stupid to rely on just the "approved" spells since as you've cited its really limiting and also in universe SOMEONE has to come up with these spells so why not add another.
Seriously though, even the most skilled most trained swordsman today couldn’t possibly take on anything larger than like an adolescent dragon, Also if magic is on the table it’s already established that monks are using ki in their strikes, so yes it’s fine to punch a dragon to death.
When getting realistic a trained swordsman also tries to keep a certain distance from his opponent. Below that certain distance he's either going to back off, switch to a smaller weapon, or go for an unarmed strike to force the opponent back. Which is something Cody is conveniently ignoring.
@@Quandry1 As a skilled swordsman myself I was going to say exactly that, thank you. Getting "inside" your opponents strike distance is absolutely a thing.
Yeah, the moment you start crying about combat realism in a world with magic, you lose all credibility. Realistically if combat magic was even possible, that'd be what everyone uses. If you can't do magic, you find a different profession, simple as that.
9:30 I enjoy rolling for stats; just as you can get high stats, you can also roll low stats. These weaknesses can really work towards the roleplay and fun aspects of the game. In my group someone got a -3 strength modifier, so we gave him a sickle to heal others with negative damage numbers.
@@SuperNerd9695 Oh don't worry the nonmagical sickle of healing was completely balanced Even if he managed to land a hit with -3 to hit, he had to roll a 1d4-3 for damage. That's -2 damage (or +2hp) at minimum, and 1 damage max. Fair and Balanced.
Hot Take: Sorcerer should have some kind of short rest ability; all other casters do besides them (until level 20, but really even then they only get the equivalent of 1 3rd level spell slot back per short rest and that’s insanely late in the game.)
I think that if that happened to the sorcerer it would just end up with what the Mystic was trying to be an I'm not sure if that is really the type of meta sorcerer is going for? Like I do think they should lean in to their sorcerey points more because oddly enough in subclasses it really feels like an after thought in a lot of them, so like whenever 6e comes around I think maybe if there was more points per level and more verity in metamagic or subclass abilities using those points that could feel that sense of their magic is different and more flexable even if they have less spells. Also any class abilities between level 6 and 10 would be real good to have because those levels are a real drought
Birbology Not sure if they’d be the best considering how few spells they have, no access to ritual casting, & no short rest abilities. They do have the largest amount of cantrips, but spell points don’t change that at all. I really don’t think it’d have too large of an effect especially because sorcerers could already do the thing that spell points set out to do by converting spell slots into higher level slots by using sorcery points as the in-between.
@@Birbucifer I play with spell points for my sorcerer with a wizard and a bard in the party and I never really feel OP at all. Like yea I can do some really crazy things if I only have one combat big boss battle a day, but I still have limited spells, I dont have ritual casting, once my points are gone I can't even cast spells anymore for the day. It balances out really well in almost every game I played. Well I say almost because sorcadin with spell points varient is broken af and if you love your DM or your charcater you shouldn't try it.
If we're going for realism, a small party of people with swords and daggers aren't hurting dragons either. Maybe an massive army with dozens of ballistas.
The dragon swipes the battlefield with his tail, all the 20 soldiers within 30 ft. of him are thrown away and fall prone Oh, but the party that consists of angery-man, the lord of the vegans and your average thief somehow manages to kill it
Wizard Orcs make bad characters!? I made an Orc Artificer who low-key despised his own species, and was searching for an alchemical way to make himself human. His arc was one of self-acceptance.
That's actually beautiful. I had a Kobold Warlock with a similar yearning for self-acceptance, but one of the other players killed me by selling me to a succubus. That was a fun session.
Evocation is essentially creating energies and chucking them at something- summoning some fire-related energy for a fireball, quicky chucking together an energy-ball for Resilient Sphere, etc. I guess the logic might be Cure Wounds is a matter of hastily shoving healing energy into someone, like stabbing someone with adrenaline rather than performing complex surgery.
I was just thinking this as an explanation nearly word for word. I've noted a lot of dms will say healing magic can let you recover from a cuts, scrapes, and burns quickly. But, if you broke a bone or any other major injury you would actually need to take time to recover and healing magic would not help you all that much. With this in mind it would make perfect sense for cure wounds and other healing magic to be evocation based.
@@godspeedhero3671 It's in the same way Protection for Poison is abjuration. Abjuration is a protective kind of magic, and Lesser Restoration is a spell that removes the effect of being blinded, deafened, paralyzed or poisoned. One of the results of abjuration spells is removing harmful effects. Makes sense to me.
People think of monk and they always think Buddhist monks. I love the hot take idea of having the dragon punching monk being a gregorian style monk. Brother George has no time for a dragon to be interrupt his chants.
"From levels 1 through 5 you can just die to a bad roll" me looking at my level 4 bard that lived on 1 hp from MANY bad rolls fighting goblins: how are you still alive my bard: *I HAVE NO IDEA*
My now 6th lvl Paladin has been unconcious during or at the end of battles more often than not. But when he stays concious he is almost full live at the end of every fight.
Cure wounds is an attack that deals positive energy damage, which heals any living thing. It's the same general idea of energy control as more normal evocation spells, but positive energy.
@@justaredpanda3283 exactly, especially since you can't straight up kill the person you're trying to help. Positive energy always heals the living, while the arrow bit I have seen kill quite a few times before the healing can take effect. Unless we do older ed rules and too much positive energy makes you explode
Yeah actually you are right, this is also why you can harm undead with it. Just like you can imagine a fire spell draws its power from the plane of fire, healing magic would work on the same idea.
On the Weird Race/Class combos, this guy I used to talk to on a discord server created a Kenku Barbarian who was also a mafia don or something like that that sold weapons on the black market. If memory serves, he legit calculated and created the amount of explosive yield it would take of his specialty grenades to kill a dragon and *made it* before yeeting it all into said dragon's face (he made it ahead of time). That guy made *lots* of weird race/class combos and they were all interesting as hell
I like weird race/class combos too. My weirdest is probably Haughilde my half-hill-giant astronomer, thief and healer. The wide hills opened her eyes to the stars, and she thinks of life forces as quite like the little sparks in the sky. And she doesn't believe people own things, since we are so small in the vast universe, how could we possibly pretend such importance. So she takes without guilt (and gives without loss), and gets away with it by having a lot of skill in a body nobody expects that skill to reside in.
We have what we call the Concrete Halfling in our game. It was a campaign I ran to get my new players into the game. I let them start at level 7 and be whatever they wanted from the base player manual. One of my players ended up picking a barbarian but for some reason ended up having to play a halfling (because that was the only barbarian mini he could find I think) and said he felt like a halfling would make a poor barbarian because you could punt them... but after he finished his sheet this was the tankiest fucking halfling that it would be like kicking a block of concrete. Aka The Concrete Halfling. He went on to become a legend along with our grifting cleric who charged for his services (sometimes causing harm to make money for healing) because he worshipped a god of wealth.
I love having a guard in a patrol that has 1 use of counterspell or a line of prison guards using counter spell spell scrolls that have been supplied to them etc. in my games cause it makes sense that in a world where a thief can make your area explode with fire you might wanna stop that as a guard in a major town/guarding a jail
Jacob, we all know that Cody is going to make another response video opening with “No Jacob, you ARE a younger version of me, and here’s the mAtHeMaTiCaL ReAsOniNg as to why” 😂
THEORY!! Clerics forced the wizard world to see healing spells as evocation because their main source of income is healing magic and necromancy is illegal in a lot of dnd places. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I love this so much. It sort of implies that a lot of the schools of magic are classifications akin to animal families, and I really like the more scientific aspect of magic for wizards
Personally I think they should be transmutation spells. Evocation is blasting energy and necromancy is sorta negative energy. Neither of those help with a stab wound, unless ig you cautarize the wound with Firebolt...
@@jamieadams2589 well there are necromancy spells that have to do with taking and giving life ie “vampiric touch” and “life transference”. This makes me think that necromancy is less a spell of undeath and more one of life and death. But yeah as you said it could equally be transmutation.
@@jamieadams2589 Agreed. In my own personal ttrpg system I have made healing magic a specialization of the transmutation category. It just makes sense, repairing damage to the body is changing the physical form of the wound.
@@caseolum There is a transmutation spell called regeneration. It really depends how the spell heals the wound tbh. Evocation spells create positive and pure energy that almost instantly heals a small or medium wound, bruiser burn. Necromancy spells are about life and death, so they manipulate the energy of life to heal a wound, no matter the size. Transmutation stimulates the tissue around the wound to divide, heal and regenerate. Every school of magic can heal, but they do so in different styles depending on what the school specializes in.
13:55 I played as a human fighter who started out as generic hero # 143715 (got his village burned down, parents died, uses a longsword, the whole nine yards) and while he started out as a meme over the course of the campaign he was more and more fleshed out as he got in more scenarios where he had to make choices and he has easily become my favorite character i've ever played
Humans aren't basic really~ it just depends on how theyre made But even so. Why should anyone care? They're having fun so just dont chastise them for it~
Fancy that, starting with a blank canvas instead of a more or less premade box with implicit directives isn’t always a bad thing (I’m saying I like where you’re coming from)
I have been running a "monster of the week" campaign during lockdown. I've been themeing the monsters on dragon colours and basic monsters with affects to mirror the dragon's element. I'm up to the green one so I thought I'd look for interesting spells based on poison damage. I've only found poison spray. I agree with the pyromancer take.
Assuming it's not already covered by another monster, you'll probably have to mix in some acid spells. (... Why are poison and acid even different damage types, anyway, if there's going to be so few poison attacks?)
And I can't really mix in acid damage as I overdid that a few weeks ago. I'm probably going to make use of other things like suffocation and conditions
With the multiple heroes outside of the party take, my first campaign had multiple parties, but we all worked together separately by completing separate parts of the story, but it worked out really well, most likely because we had an amazing DM
My dragonborn went through the ringer with that last take. 2 things about my early player days for alignment: A) I thought lawful was following The Law, not having a strong moral code B) I attempted to make him fit the alignment rather than make and change the alignment to match him. Extremely short backstory, he was a soldier who defied orders, in order to protect his company from sacrifice, resulting in self exile due to his honor. His goal: restore honor by returning the dragonborn to their former glory, no matter the cost to himself or other races. In the beginning, he was very selfless with an acute disregard for the rules, and no goal to speak of. Then I realized that Lawful means Moral, and changed his alignment, reeling back the disregard for the rules. He still didn't go out of his way to follow them, but didn't actively look for ways to break them. Then I actually played him, and through doing so, I realized he wasn't good at all. He didn't try to do good, unless doing good would actively help him. Around this time he also developed his goal. And it hit me. He wasn't CG, or even LG. He was LE. He held no other race in regard for his morals, his moral compass always pointed towards the Clan, and he was actively seeking to remove the other races in order to make room for the dragonborn. He wasn't just evil. He was a BBEG, and our campaign got a whole lot darker
As far as alignment goes, reverse it. Pick the alignment that your character fits into, don't try to fit your character into one of the alignments. Alignment can also change as you play, based on character development stuff like that
@@futuza I disagree. When you're a chaotic good character you still don't act like a murder hobo. You just don't take the laws seriously down to the letter like lawful characters do. You might also steal from any characters you don't particularly like who are selfish.
Chaotic aligned doesn't mean you don't know what they'll do. Like Raven said, chaotic good is more about bucking the system; do the right thing even if it gets you arrested. I recently played a rogue that I referred to as 'alignmentfluid;' they don't really know what their morals are and change their mind a lot depending on who they're with or what they're doing. Some people said that's just Neutral but I feel like it's more nuanced than that, in my heart.
13:57 Human Fighter: Percy from crit role..... one of the most complex characters in vox machina, is a human fighter, your class and race do not define who your character is.
Taliesin is just really good at writing characters no matter what race/class they are. I'm particularly enjoying Caduceus, as he's just such a genuinely nice guy and has such a positive impact on everyone else's characters.
@Austin Hicks And Molly was genuinely the most wholesome blood mage in all of fiction. He was probably my favorite character, and his death was an incredibly impactful moment
I may be bias, playing a human fighter and all at the moment. But I get the feeling that I might have the most nuanced character at our current table, me the human Mcfighter man, because I chose mercenary as my background and chose to be the Neutral Good guy in a party of Chaotic Neutral. I'm easily one of the most dangerous characters in the party in combat, but my way of playing a merc was to decide that I became an adventurer to get away from the mercenary life. That I'd lost my taste for having to kill people and thought that by being an Adventurer I could live a cleaner life of killing monsters and evils that endanger good decent people instead. This has really influenced the party enough that my DM has joked that the campaign gets kept on track by disapproving dad energy. Though I can't say that I disapprove of any other characters, just that I like to lead by example, so I'll try to spare foes that we safely can or try to talk things out or do right by folks we meet and by and large the rest of the party usually follows suit.
I think Cure Wounds is Evocation because it's the school of raw magical power, it's where the very "direct" spells are from, defined mostly by having big numbers, wether it's for damage or healing. Edit: using the logic that says Cure Wounds should be Necromancy, Fireball should be conjuration since you're creating a ball of fire
Yep, that's the logic cure wounds uses. You're deluging the target in positive energy. Which is pretty close to necromancy until you realize no necromancy spells actually use that particular technique. Correct me if I'm wrong, there are a ton of spells. Also, yeah, spell schools are more so defined by the technique and mindset used to perform them effectively.
12:22 - Homebrewing Spells works really well, like just swapping the elements on the spell you want. Swapped several fire type spells to Ice/Frost for my Cryomancer. For Example- "Flame Blade" I swapped to "Ice Blade", Kept the stats but changed the element damage and how I Rp the usage.
Personally, I really hate this approach, because, imo, the flavour should come from real differences in these spells, not it just being a different color spell. Like, making a fireball an iceball may as well just be "well my fireball is blue, and different things are weak to blue magic, now what!??!?!" I want spells for different elements that are all viable spells, but are best in different circumstances, like how lightning bolt will wreck a hallway of enemies, but fireball is better for open spaces. That's a small difference, and I personally think fireball should be reduced to only a 15 foot radius anyway, but it makes them different and have different vibes. Like, maybe fire magic is really good at AOE damage, but not so good at point damage, whereas lightning magic can do TONS of damage, but only to one target. It may also do AOE, but not as well as fire, like maybe it'll do weak sonic damage. Ice maic could be awesome for controlling the battlefield by slowing enemies, freezing them in place, creating obstacles like slippery floors, but not do as much damage. It could also be used for protection, like creating a wall of ice to block attacks, idunno. Maybe poison/acid magic could do weak but persistent AOE or persistent point damage, but have that only pay off over a long term, maybe as an area-denial focused magic. You feel me? I want real differences. Not just reskins.
So people can handle spells and channeling the power of pure anger to punch somebody's head off, but not an enlightened individual being able to channel ki/chi/the energy of the universe to give them superhuman abilities?
@@kvalvag5934 short version: I thought it would be funny long version: because I had the image on my phone years ago for something and then when I wanted to change my pfp I decided to use it.
alignment can be used as a storytelling device. i recently played a character who started out neutral good, went to chaotic good and upon realizing the evil in the world she had a whole crisis and went chaotic neutral.
@@Bawinni I know. Won't keep you from breaking bones. A lot of real martial artists say "The question if you're fighting a guy with a knife isnt whether you'll get stabbed. Your skill just decides how badly you'll get stabbed." Then apply that to armor and longswords.
While I agree, I also feel as though a mace/warhammer and a sling would be good weapons for a Monk to use against an armored opponent, as those are armor-combating weapons. Likewise, against an unarmored or modestly armored opponent, a spear/javelin/shortsword and a shortbow would be the most ideal weapons
@@IoanCenturion monks can use monk weapons for a reason lmao. And for reference, a monk's unarmed strike is not limited to punches only, it can be kicks, headbutts or any other strike you make with a body part. When you kick someone in the head, it's more of a "leg strength vs neck strength" instead of "leg toughness vs plate armor toughness" scenario. Armor offers protection but doesn't make you invulnerable. Not to mention that DnD monks are semi-mystical ki-channeling living weapons.
Alignment is a quick and easy way to describe a characters behavioral patterns when you dont have time to go into detail about "the complex emotional baggage my character holds"
Alignment is very fun to play with. I had a Chaotic "Good" Human Fighter character once. I put good in quotes because he was incredibly violent, hated interacting with people that he didn't know, and relied on bloodshed to get his way out of problems. What makes him able to hold the alignment of good however, was the fact that he would never let somebody be the victim. He stood up for everybody who got bullied, or targeted for no real reason. He saved villages, not because he liked the people no he fucking hated them, but because somebody stronger than them was picking on that village and he just wouldn't stand for it. He barely took loot for himself, the only things he ever actually directly wanted was some odd pieces of the things they killed so he could fashion unique equipment out of them. He is my favorite display of Chaotic Good I've ever had. He had no code, he just had two goals, to help the innocents, and to become the greatest fighter on the planet, everything else was secondary.
when you have clownery takes such as "monks not being realistic enough in my fantasy ttrpg about magic and dragons", the clown comes back to do a stunning strike then a flurry of blows
"Those combats are only thirty seconds long, not enough to get a good cardio workout." I don't know if you've ever wrestled before, but I can tell you fighting another human being for 30 seconds straight both of you going as hard as you possibly can is actually some of the most intense cardio you'll do. Sure it doesn't prepare you for running a triathlon but you're also lugging 50 lbs of equipment all day long so that likely makes up for it. Not that I disagree with your whole realism point, because I don't at all, just pointing something out needlessly because it makes me feel smart and I like to stroke my ego.
Carrying 50 lbs of equipment is part of the training regimen for military boot camp lol. Though the exact weight varies based on what you're expected to actually do once you're in the military, but yeah, carrying 50+ lbs of gear IS the exercise, theoretically. At least part of it.
Just to stay healthy, it's recommended we get ourselves to heavy breathing for at-least 20 minuets a day. If you're actually looking to _maintain_ crazy strength, you'd need even more.
I mean in general all adventurers that are martial focused would typically have to be somewhat fit but that is something i imagine almost no party really does much of and thats training, long travel and occasional fights wouldn't be enough for most melee classes to stay in top form and keep those high strength scores
Side note on alignment... my favorite character was chaotic neutral... because he was driven insane by his patron. It added some flavor to it balancing the need of self-preservation via a party versus the need to please himself and his patron.
I played an LE character who was friendly and personable to all his allies in the party (Because why wouldn't he? They're helping him.) Except the warforged, because it isn't a real person so it doesn't count. Sadly the campaign never got far enough for this to change... I honestly don't know if I would have.
Had that happen between a goblin paladin and a dwarf wizard. The wizard was old and kinda shitty about it, but he learned over time and grew to be BETTER
I thought that the tiny triangle on his hand was a spec of dirt on my screen and I kept trying to wipe it off. My wisdom is a 4. Also nice vid Also also I played a mentally insane wild magic sorcerer lizardfolk names “git”
I like party splits when it provides interesting role playing opportunities, like the rogue and wizard break off to a different path but find something made of solid gold but can’t move it because the Barbarian is on the other path with the Bard. Making them find a unique solution until their walking bag of muscles can take over the lifting
THANK YOU Cody’s monk opinions always kinda pissed me off and the reasoning for most people I’ve heard who share that opinion just amounts to “I don’t like it so it must not be good”. Also quivering palm can one shot a dragon 🤔
The first time I ran a dragon, I had to up it from a young to adult dragon mid-fight (it lost concentration on a reduce spell) because of the monk, and before you ask, yes, my players were cool with that. They wanted to fight a dragon, not steamroll one.
One of my most memorable characters was a "handsome" and charismatic goblin bard named Gneek Kartr, he loved playing silly and funny song with his violin and all his Vicious Mockery were just oddly offensive and specific stuff because according to him that's Goblin Humor, like "You like like your knees will start hurting sooner than most" which was more confusing than it was infuriating and my war song was The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Man I miss him.
As a DM, I love splitting my party when the time is right, especially in more horror-focused campaigns. It can really help with the atmosphere when 1) the party doesn't know what's happening with the rest of the members and b) smaller groups means more danger so it keeps my dumbass party from yeeting themselves into every encounter headlong like a bunch of angry boars
How do you even manage 4-6 other players, each of them not knowing the other's condition? Do you have independent sessions for each player or something?
@@dressigvil I think it might just be the way my party is? They're all really hyperactive and when they're all sitting still together for long periods of time it can get really chaotic and difficult to manage. I usually just have the players I need stay at the table and then send the other ones off to a separate room and cycle them through as needed. That way, the folks who aren't present can go on their phones/do whatever it is they want to do and mess around where it won't be a bother for me or the folks still at the table.
Fighter as a class gives you so many options to build them exactly how you want, you get all the armor and weapons in the game, more feats than anyone else and variant human gets an extra one. How can something be vanilla boring when they have so many options? Echo Knight, Arcane Archer, Eldritch Knight... hell Battle Master's whole thing is giving you options. How can anyone say it's a bland and boring class when you have all of these options and chances to build exactly how you want to play? I don't understand the sentiment from both a mechanical point of view or a roleplay point of view. It's just kind of stupid.
A great example of this is Percy from Critical Role. Percy is a human fighter with a backstory about wanting to avenge his dead family. Literally the most basic DnD character ever. But they made him interesting, just due to good character development, interesting story, and just being creative with the character
A friend made a non-variant human champion fighter with point-buy stats and optimized build. According to the "vanilla" argument, that _should_ make his character the most boring thing ever. Rom was an escaped slave-gladiator from a distant desert of crimson sand. He often regaled the party with stories of that strange place (which he filled a 40 page word document with) and recounted unique perspectives he'd picked up, having spent 25 years in captivity. He would sometimes griped about his "chatty" wife, who waited for him in the desert. It was later revealed that his wife was in-fact a legendary 7-foot dread-warrior who barely spoke a word, and indeed it was actually _Rom_ who did all the talking in their relationship. Suddenly his comments about how she'd "kill him" if he didn't have an anniversary gift took on a more literal meaning. Rom was a simple man with simple ideas and simple goals. He was an optimized human fighter, and he was the most compelling character I've ever encountered.
My favourite character was a scumbag human fighter who was pretty much just a highly functioning sociopath whose soul purpose in life was to drink, be slutty and progress the plot
"Monks are unrealistic" Alright, you know what basically every person who trains with a martial weapon learns either before, or as part of that training? - HOW TO FIGHT WITHOUT THE WEAPON - It is fundamental to combat to understand your natural weapons. Even knights, samurai and vikings punch, kick, and grab. Because even with a 2.5ft piece of sharpened metal in your hand, your fists are still useful. Additionally, this argument of "trained to keep the sword in between you" is bunk because it assumes a disparity in the skill level between combatants, which, if true, isn't going to be changed by who has the sword or not. I ain't gonna to fight Bruce Lee, regardless of if I have a longsword. And lastly, if the viability of combatants is based purely on the level and efficacy of armament, your sword and board fighter gets thrashed by the barn-sized mess of scales, claws and fangs just as readily as the guy who tried to fight it with a his fists.
Furthermore, many unarmed martial arts were literally invented so that farmers could defend themselves against armed, armored, and possibly even mounted enemies.
Okay armchair martial artist lmao. You vastly overestimate the effectiveness of martial arts. A guy with a spear or a sword will wreck any unarmed fighter 9/10. Life ain't a movie
As someone who's trained to use a longsword, master martial artists are fucking terrifying. Sure I can swing a sword good but damn they turned their whole body into a weapon
@@chuggaa100 There's actually quite a lot of precedence for people with swords being taken down by people who didn't have a weapon. In fact there are entire historical combat systems designed for dealing with someone who's gotten too close for you to effectively use your weapon. Grappling was a huge component of historical combat, so was striking, but much less than grappling. You are right that the unarmed person has an enormous disadvantage that they aren't likely to overcome, and that even with a massive skill gap it would still be extremely difficult, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. In fact the situation here shares many similarities to the situation a swordsman faces when fighting a spearman, where if you're able to close the distance before the spearman can step back, you'll gain the advantage. This is just much higher stakes when without a weapon, as you no longer have a piece of metal to defend with.
@@danielhounshell2526 Not nearly enough evidence for this. A man with a weapon will beat an unarmed man most of the time. This is not a movie. Height and weight matter much more than anything else in a fight. Martial arts are not very useful in a real fight, apart from a grappling sport like bjj or judo.
You mean you can’t? I had a battle master fighter with the SM feat do the whole dual shield thing a couple years back. The player was so good about being a control/ support fighter, I eventually homebrewed a spiked targe that he could use as a decent weapon too. He really deserved it, dude had an original build idea and didn’t complain when I didn’t make it overpowered. As for the AC, yeah thugs and goblins couldn’t touch him, but I just started designing encounters with enemies that used more saving throws
I too want to be a fortress wizard, banded AC is kind of annoying. Its not like an enemy couldn't target your wisdom or something, just let me be cool and be untouchable to an orc or something, sheesh.
13:36 On the "Uncommon Race/Class Combinations is a Crutch" take: If done right, it can lead to great roleplay and some fun mechanical quirks. Example: I've got a Wood Elf Barbarian who was raised by human warriors. His elf blood helps to flesh out his skillset both in and out of combat with things like Mask of the Wild and the WIS bonus. But more importantly, it's been really fun to play with the Nature vs Nurture argument. Everyone expects for barbarian warriors to be towering brutes, and for wood elves to skinny little nature lovers. When you have one raised to try and be like the other, how does that effect their motivations and personality? And how does the world around them react? If you work with your DM and your fellow players, you can have some really memorable sessions.
THIS!!!!!! “bland” race/class combinations can be fun. “weird” race/class combos can be boring. and the other way around can go JUST as easily. i genuinely think it does not matter, as long as you add SOMETHING personal that makes your character stand out from what they are on paper.
Cure wounds is evocation I believe because the idea for it is that you are pulling power from the plane of positive energy, which is basically the energy of all life. This is why healing spells used to hurt undead. So yeah its evocation because just like how fireball is the act of summoning the energy of fire, cure wounds is summoning the energy of life.
Hmmm there are some odd things here if in fact you are pulling from the positive energy plane. You can technically kill someone with over healing them. I believe the official rule, I read somewhere, that If you enter the positive energy realm, each round you gain a certain amount of hitpoints and once you exceed double, you pop! Also, shouldn’t healing spells be conjuation, if you are opening a small portal to the positive energy plane against someone’s wound?
@@jacobvanveit3437 I don't think its exactly opening holes to the plane of positive energy, it is creating positive energy, as the example I used, fireball isnt opening a hole to the plane of fire its just creating fire. Though that type of thing can be more open to how the player/gm flavors magic.
The Easily Bored Gamer not to mention conjuring magic from another realm is far more powerful magic then fabricating magic to mimic an effect. I’m with you here, just cool how you could create arcane healing spells rather than it being “typically” divine.
6:06 When you're watching a Marvel film, there might be other things going on while a movie is happening, but unless it's a crossover movie, Iron Man is never like "oh yeah that's just Thor doing his own thing in the background anyway back to my movie" because it's Iron Man's story, not Thor's. I think that's how it should be with parties. Having other events happen in the game's world is good, but you shouldn't have another party doing stuff just for the sake of "world-building". Stuff like Doctor Strange showing up in Thor: Ragnarok makes sense because it has a specific purpose in the story, but otherwise I think it should be left out, in my opinion.
It can be done well or done poorly, like most ideas. I do think that it is important to figure out where your world falls on the spectrum of rarity of heroes as this can have major ramifications on everything from character backstories (in a world where heroes are commonplace green heroes tend to start a lot more green) to rarity of adventure (in worlds with few heroes there tends to be a lot fewer problems and more railroady plots) to how society interacts with heroes ("Oh you eliminated those bandits, let me just get the standard bandit elimination reward for ya"). There might be formal groups people looking to solve problems... some sort of League of Adventurers as it were. I once had a campaign where there were about 6 groups of adventurers operating in the same area and as things moved along one group became rivals, one group became allies, one group was revealed as evil devil worshipers, and the other two got outstripped pretty quickly since they just didn't have what it took. It worked pretty well, the key part was to use them sparingly and with purpose, and never forget the PCs are the main focus.
6:30 my DM did this in a cool way I think. We were employed by a kingdom alongside other mercenaries. Fairly early on we got in a scuffle with another party made up of dragonborns, got pawned. Occasionally we would fight alongside them in pitched battles. There were interactions. My dragonborn (the only one in my party) kept seeking out the leader of the party-that beat us into the ground-to train under him. Eventually the other party gets wiped by the enemy and we eventually take revenge for them. It was great building relationships with them and they served as a reference to our own growth. Where initially they overpowered us, we ended up defeating what they couldn't.
I think that if you only want to tell stories where everything revolves around you, maybe you need to play less D&D and do more talking to a therapist. I strongly prefer worlds that feel like they exist regardless of the PCs. The PCs may be cool dudes, and may be doing something important, but, if they weren't around, things would still go on, and other shit would still get done. The world almost never hinges on the PCs, and there are more powerful characters out there in the world doing their own stuff. It's just important to still be having your OWN story where your PCs are still, in some regard, the heroes of that story. There's nothing bad about, say, a story where there's this big epic continent-spanning war with epic characters doing awesome shit, and you're just playing some dudes in some local part of it having your own challenges and triumphs as part of that bigger picture. That doesn't undermine the PCs or a good story. At most, it undermines juvenile power fantasy. Plus, one of the benefits of persistent worlds like this is that they can exist across campaigns. So the players, in your next campaign, can see the marks they made on the world, and, if there's a time gap, what's happened since. By weaving a greater narrative in the world like this, you can have campaigns at various different levels, and still have a gradual sense of progress and achievement. Like, maybe you play an epic campaign where you are the heroes in some grand war, and depending on the outcome, different places might be destroyed or saved, then maybe you play a low-level campaign in one of the towns that might have been wiped out if the players in the prior campaign didn't do X cool thing, and if the PCs save or don't save that town and it's struggles, then maybe in a third mid-level campaign, that town might have either developed into a small city, or been destroyed. Even small things like that can make a big difference if they're recognizable and persistent, and motive not just the characters, but the players to action. Like maybe in a prior campaign they got attached to characters in that town, so now in the next, even though the characters don't know them, the players have a personal reason to be invested, and I think that's important, because the players are not the characters.
I bought Grim Hollow a while back after your recommended it. I've been running a campaign from it now for a month and absolutely love it. It is definitely 10/10
11:16 I really like Jacob’s take on this. I’m a baby DM and my first session had a dungeon that branched off into three pathways: left was the treasure room, right was a trap room, and straight ahead was a prisoner. The Paladin and Bard already beat the BBEG’s hide black and blue so they had him lead them down the right pathway and I really RPed him getting cocky knowing that he has an ace up his sleeve. The tortle druid was confident that he could open the locked door by himself so he stayed outside the entrance of the treasure room trying to Beyblade his way in. The rogue and warlock went straight forward and freed the prisoner, effectively adding an Illithid to the party. I found splitting the party super fun and a creative way for each of the players to explore their character’s mannerisms, and I could generally tell when I was spending too much time with one group than another.
Step 1: Make a character that's interesting. Step 2: Make their class fighter. That's it, that's all. Class does not define character. It can inform aspects of it, but does not define it.... and "fighter" is a lazy way of saying "this is a blank slate that can be whatever you want".
I'm honestly more interested in him making the same video for making wizard's more interesting characters. 99% of the ones I see can be summed up with "I'm a bookworm. I want more books. That's integral to my character growth btw"
14:55 I stand by my interpretation of alignment as being dynamic instead of rigid. A character's actions inform their alignment, not the other way around. A character doesn't follow the law *because* they're lawful good, they're lawful good because they follow the law. A character doesn't scam an old lady of their remaining life savings *because* they're neutral evil, they're neutral evil because they decided to scam an old lady out of their savings. Of course, I rather not use alignment at all to begin with. They play almost 0 roles in most games I've played or ran.
It does play a roll if you are a warlock, cleric or paladin with respect to having your power taken away from you if your actions don't line up with your patron. There's also the Detect Evil and Good Spell and Protection from Evil and Good, which as per the rules set by Mystra, are required to always work.
I think it goes both ways. Actions color the actor and that actor is influenced by the color they are painted. Doing evil makes you more evil which makes you more likely to do evil and have a malicious mindset. Doing good makes you more good which makes you more likely to do good and have a benevolent mindset. Practice being an asshole and it gradually feels more natural and you get better at it, practice being nice and it gradually feels more natural and you get better at it, sort of thing but with metaphysical significance tacked on. Remember, evil and good are elemental forces in d&d. If you torture an orphanage of children to death and bury them in a mass grave then, even if you don't use magic, they can rise as undead because of all the evil surrounding their deaths. Likewise, a murderer who was executed and buried improperly may rise as an undead simply because the evil they are tainted with attracts necrotic energies.
I think guilds with other heroic parties are really cool. It's a great way to let your party pick and choose the specific adventures they want because other people can do different things. It also gives them peers and people who they might want to save or who they might know are coming to save them and they just need to hold out or get somewhere. The key things in my opinion are don't have them in a combat where you're fighting yourself half the time, don't make them the focus of the story, don't have them eclipse the party. Especially the last bit. Don't have them yoink the party out of danger at the last second. Have the party know it's coming and have to earn their salvation. You always want the party's actions and decisions to be why they live or die.
We don't split the party often, but when we have done so, our DM has been really great about dividing the time evenly between the characters :D so we don't have to sit there for half an hour just waiting for someone else to get their shit done. also keeps the timeline nice and clear!
POV: You're an assassin sent to kill Jacob, but as you are about to stab him in his bed he starts telling you his hot takes. You listen.
Why does this make the commentary so much better
@@unbanrofellos5786 cause in this context, you're now more involved, I think, and it also creates an air of suspense? Like, you came with this purpose....but this is chill, so you are waiting, you listen. will you be convinced to spare him? Like, it takes it from being a youtube video filmed in a slightly unusual place, if cozy, chill place, to this bizarre scenario, and things are playing out in an unexpected way *given* the unusual scenario.Like, Hey, why is he chilling here, all relaxed, giving you his hot takes? Has he accepted his fate, and spilling out his feelings for all to see? Does he hope to change your mind by being calm and accepting you, the assassin into his home, and treating you like a friend, regaling you with his personal thoughts? *will* you take him as a friend and spare him?
But before I begin, let’s talk about Grim Hollow!
i rolled a nat 1, i'm kind of stuck here
No one man should that high of a charisma stat 🤔
“Can’t punch a dragon” these scrubs never read Beowulf
Beowulf gang
Oh no my sword broke. Guess I’ll have to stab it with my fists
I mean, to be fair even Beowulf thought it was a bad idea to fight a dragon without weapons despite the dragon being (technically) unarmed.
And he was right.
To be fair, he was in his 60s or 70s when he fought the dragon.
Yeah. He literally stripped buck-naked at one point just so a fight would be more fair for the monster.
“Monks don’t make sense”
As a barbarian, getting angry makes you survive getting hit with a lance from a charging horse while shirtless
As a rogue, who could be within a 3 mile radius of fire capable of burning the universe to nothing, doing a backflip lets you not get burned
@@spiceyicey as a fighter I can Slow down time, getting in multiple swings mopre then any other Martial character can. with the limited ability to get mutliple actions done in the span of 6 seconds. and can cause wounds to suddenly close on the spot, these abilities are availble to me again after sitting down for about an hour.
As a wizard I am dead
see my "issue" (although its not much of one since you know its make believe) is that functionally monks dont make sense, like how if you have a bad guy holding someone at knife point and then someone speaks up and says that knives only deal 1d4 damage. in the game that person should survive the attack probably despite getting a knife to the throat but thats not how itll probably end up going because that doesnt make sense. i view monks similarly to this situation game whise theyre cool and fun but when you actually try to picture what is happening it doesnt add up. like i said i dont feel to strong about this because dnd is make believe, but its still my view point non the less
@@tacolord2561 what doesn't make sense? He just punches really really hard. It's nothing different then any other weapon, except it's called a monk. It's just a human with good spirituality who trained in martial arts.
People:”Monks can’t hurt a dragon by punching it”
Monks: *with stunning strike and ki empowered strikes* “Skedooosh”
haha unarmed boi go brrrrrrrr
I didn't know Markiplier was a monk IRL
Now I want to play a monk just so I can be Po from Kung fu panda. And I don’t even play monks😂
@@theyoutubeidiot6203 Is there a panda people race?
Sylph if not I will home brew that shit just for this character
"Monks are unrealistic" yes bc using a flute to do magic or wild shaping into a bear are so realistic cody.
I agree, wildshape is stupid.
"Your turn wizard. What do? Ok. Thief, you're up. What do? Cool. Fighter, what do? Cool. Bear, what do? Of course you do."
Also.... A longsword is quite possibly the worst choice against a dragon, realistically... Longswords are designed to fight humanoids, using such a weapon against a dragon is dumb. The dragon might not even bother fighting back. It's not just dragons, many dnd monsters would be essentially immune to sword strikes... If you're going to call realism in DnD, you should just discard the idea of ever using a longsword.
... in the frames of D&D realism. You look at it through the lenses of the real world.
@@kapitan19969838
Seeing as how D&D Monks use ki to empower their attacks, I still don't see how it's any different. In D&D the Monk is basically the "create your own shonen anime/martial arts movie protagonist" class. In fact, most monk subclasses basically mimic a particular show or movie:
Astral Self: Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (part 3 and onward)
Drunken Master: Drunken Master
Four Elements: Avatar: The Last Airbender (not an anime per say, but it's an anime-inspired series)
Kensai: Rurouni Kenshin
Long Death: Not sure. Kinda has some Bleach-esque themes to it but it doesn't actually match anything mechanically.
Mercy: Another way of playing a healbot without playing a cleric.
Open Hand: Fist of the North Star, One Punch Man, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (parts 1 and 2), most martial arts movies
Shadow: Naruto
Soul Knife: Zamasu from Dragon Ball Z
Sun Soul: Everyone else from Dragon Ball Z
Tranquility: Another healbot
Anyway, once you take into account both the mechanics and lore of the Monk class, you can definitely see that they aren't just some average joe trying to punch things.
@@VestedUTuber Impressive, but it all seems kind of lame. Like this whole ''ki'' idea was created for the sole purpose of justifying Monk's existence in D&D
Our monk referred to himself as a "Punch Wizard".
"Yeah, I'm a long-ranged monk."
@@seigeengine so sunsoul
In one game we were faced with a bored witch who said she'd help us if any of us could overcome her magical defenses to move her from where she was standing with any form of magic. After several failed attempts, the monk walked up and said "I cast fist." And decked her in the face with his ki enhanced fist. After a fairly lengthy debate of the party bard convincing the witch that ki does in fact qualify for the definition of magic, she begrudgingly agreed to help us.
“It’s dumb that you can punch a dragon”
It’s dumb that anyone without extensive magic power could stand a chance against a dragon, it’s a giant lizard that breathes napalm, so what’s your point?
That and they're covered in scales that are harder than steel AND they can fly.
Punching dragons is stupid.
Especially when you can kick them in the balls or RKO them xD
For some reason it isn't pointed out more, but every character in DnD is magical. Why can a banneret fighter perform an aoe heal without a spell or divine assistance? Or perform 8 powerful attacks at level 20 within 6 seconds? Why can a rogue dodge all damage from a fireball that fills an entire enclosed space? Why can a barbarian survive a fall after reaching terminal velocity and get back up like it was nothing? Why does everyone, no matter their level of mastery, have a 1 in 20 chance of failing spectacularly AND succeeding profoundly (seriously though imagine living in a world like that)?
It's because everyone in the setting is magical. I don't know what the official universal mechanics are, but everyone has inherent magic that is refined and increased through choosing a class and leveling up. Same thing with how skill checks work, particularly charisma. Everyone is some flavor of low end reality warper (except high level casters) and that is why all these things, in the world of dnd, are reasonable.
@MonochromaticPrism That's one of the many reasons old D&D is better. Only some people were magical, the rest were just skilled at fighting.
@@MonochromaticPrism This. This is something that is a really huge inonsistency in D&D. For me it creates a ludo-narrative disonance. To explain simply, the things that are implied by rule set and core gameplay are usually so different than the narrative of the game/campaign that it brakes my immersion. Rules often imply that every character is "magical" in some degree. Adding overabundance of magic items and artifacts etc. and suddenly im starting to think like "Sooo... why are there peasants? Farmers? Blacksmiths?" If getting your hands on a magical item sometimes requires so much effort as killing a bunch of goblins, climbing a mountain etc... why isnt this community fixated on it? Why would anyone choose to live in this world as a lowly pig herder instead of wandering the world in search of power?
And we can go even further. How is it possible for example, that this king... who is not a magic user... not a skilled fighter, is still a king? You want to tell me that for his entire life, in his kingdom of thousands of people, there was noone who would say "Hey, if we use this magical ring that supposedly is in this cavern, along with Bob's magical charisma, we can overthrow him"
This also creates a problem that, nothing is scary, nothing is particularly hard. In first CR campaign you could see this issue, altought not so evident at first glance, and never named. When main characters aquired the means of teleportation, along with 2 (!) strongholds, nothing was a really huge deal.
Oh, we have a problem, we are bloodied etc. aaaand we have a really important news that, if late, can lead to a catastrophe? Well, good that that at least 2 of our characters can either teleport us thousands of kilometers away, or communicate on those distances.
And then we get to the powercreep issue. That sometimes the group gets so powerful so quickly, that the challenges you have to prepare are ridiculous. And you get to a situation that in a particular area you have barbarians, giants, dragons and manticores (all seeing themselves as apex predator) living so close to each other that its mindboggling.
Also, the overpowered items. I am more than convinced that (SPOILER FOR CR CAMPAIGN 1) throwing Percys turbo-omega-op gun into the acid, or destroying the blade that Grog used was NOT a pure out of the blue player choices. Those items brought a huge imbalance of power in a very short notice, and i can bet that it was planned between Matt Mercer and others to destroy them.
Not hating on Mercer, still amazing narrative skills, but you can often see that he stumbles when it comes to planing the huge encounters. Y know, a group that has problems with dealing with a group of goliaths, wiped the floor with a dragon.
Maaan thats a long comment.
"Ugh, monks are dumb, it's so unrealistic. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to ride off on my pegasus to cast fireball at this demon from the fifth dimension."
Cool batman
I honestly dont get how people think swords are THAT MUCH more realistic than punches, specially talking about dragon. The thing's got teeth bigger than most swords
If you are a very well trained monk and you punch a dragon when it has 1 hit point I believe you can kill it
2 things: they are magic punches and usually magic weapons when you are at a level to fight big dragons. So they do a lot more damage than a mundane punch or slash.
Further, there is a reason gargantuan monsters have a ton of hp. A single blow won't slay it and it takes cumulative damage to bring it down.
I had a DM who didn't like ME personally playing monks. Because I was the only monk player he had ever met that knew the rules to disarming and sundering objects. First game I played with them It was 3.5 I had just joined a lvl 5ish game in progress and we were going up against a big meaty armored mini boss with a obviously magical mace.
I would like to disarm him. DM just looks at me squints, "is it going to be like that?" Me, "I can read rules."
"I want a realistic dnd game"
Me to the bard who sleeps with everything that moves: ok now roll to avoid STDs
"if you used protection, you have advantage on the roll"
“7.”
“You’ve contracted “red dragons crotch fire” take 3d6 fire damage focused on the groin after every long rest, or once every three short rests.”
“…”
“Now roll again.”
“…2.”
“Oh, so you’ve also got… oh no, “tadpole taint”, get ready to figure out how mindflayer/player-race hybrids who can survive off of brains or regular food are born.”
“But I’m a male?”
“I know.”
“…Oh dear.”
In my world states won't be as bad and will arrange for priests to cast cure disease on everyone infected before it becomes an epidemic
Not to stereotype but you guys haven't slept with many people have you? 😅
@@kholtonthebarbarian2590 Tadpole taint I honestly thought was going to be more Slaad based.
you cannot just hate all orcs because some did evil stuff, thats racist.
*laughs nervously in elven*
Oops what’s that character development as my gremlin child arin comes to learn that not every orc is evil despite one tribe destroying his village
rofl y first ever tabletop game i was a half-orc in an elven restrictive city. I went around in full armor, gloves hood and full face mask at all times
@thunderdrae
I thought they hated dwarves too?
@thunderdrae
Oh, I read over that part for some reason, whoops.
And, yeah, that’s fair.
I guess I kinda just assumed they hated dwarves more than they actually do.
(Edit: fixed the part where I used the same pronouns for two different things)
(+TidalShores) In D&D, how much elves hate dwarves is based off of edition, I believe. In older editions, there was more of a hatred between the two like in LotR, but 5e seems to be more like an ideological disagreement between heavily LG and CG societies, from the impression I got. Except for sun elves, who hate everyone other than high elves and maybe eladrin.
Reason to why evocation has a lot of healing magic.
Evocation creates energy of a certain type, be it fire, electricity, concussive etc. In DnD there's a plane of pure negative energy and a plane of pure positive energy. Evocation healing spells create energy similar to the energy on the plane of positive energy, and thus can heal people. Some healing spells were conjuration because you were teleporting energy directly from the plane of positive energy instead of creating it.
Bottom line: this is super dumb and convoluted and it should have just been fucking necromancy.
Uh yeah, I guess that makes sorta sense.
100% agree.
@@XPtoLevel3 Evocation takes up way too much of the spotlight. I have no clue why spells such as light, tiny hut and more are evocation when other schools suit them far more.
Transmutation would also make more sense than evocation.
Regenerate is already transmutation. Purify food/drink is, too. Also, transmuters can cast panacea using a philospoher stone.
You're changing (transmuting) damaged cells into healthy ones.
My thoughts on why healing magic should be necromancy instead of evocation is because you’re manipulating the life forces of different creatures.
@@blturn Why are Wall spells evocation instead of conjuration or transmutation?
"Yall should be exercising, after all those combats can are like 30 seconds thats not enough for a good cardio" thank you for giving me a new part for my drow ranger survivalist's daily routine
I feel like somebody hasn’t fought before. When it’s all out, you’re gonna find it’s a hell of a work out. It’s really hard to push your body that hard without the fight-or-flight motivation.
@DeruwynArchmage dude, its still not the same as a proper workout routine. Why do you think boxers/wrestlers/MMA fighters still train in the gym. Doesn't matter if you've got adrenaline going, a minute long fight isn't gonna do the same as deliberately working different muscle groups for an hour plus a day
@@theunloadedrpg1376 that’s not what I meant at all. (Also, I wasn’t actually meaning you specifically. And I very much was not meaning it as a dig. I apologize that I came across that way. That’s my fault.)
I guess what I really meant is that the kind of “fight for your life” type of things gives you an extreme workout. It’s why boxers, who, as you rightly pointed out, work out a ton still get absolutely exhausted during a fight. And that’s not even true f.o.f. type thing anyway. Once they’re experienced, they’re not panicking anymore. It’s not really scary for them anymore, just competitive which isn’t the same level.
When you think you’re gonna die, your body ends up removing a ton of your limiters that keep you from hurting yourself all the time. So now your muscles are pulling as hard as they can. They tear themselves and damage themselves in ways they normally wouldn’t, even for someone who trains a lot and has reduced the level of limitations below the levels that a sedentary person would have.
So my point was that the extreme levels of damage that your body would cause in a terrifying situation would more than substitute for a regular workout, despite it’s brevity. At least afterwards, it’d be a bad idea to then go work out as your body would need time to repair.
Regular exercise will reduce the amount of damage you’d take in those situations, reduce recovery time (healing, reabsorbing lactic acid, and returning to baseline resting heart rate), and make you far more effective when it happens.
And the even more core point I was really trying to make is that no amount of exercise truly substitutes/prepares you for that level of exertion. You just can’t push your body that hard during a regular workout; and for very good reason, since you’d almost certainly injure yourself and not just stress your muscles (etc.) so that they respond by building up in preparation for future exertion.
Hot Take: Tools are wildly underused except for a few (such as Alchemy Supplies and Tinker's Tools). Nobody is going to take Potter's Tools as a proficiency unless it has something specifically to do with their backstory, and even then they'll likely never be able to use this proficiency in game as an adventurer.
depends on how smart your players/DM are lol
@@jackdiddles4304 Also very true. Though, that can be said for Intelligence as well.
I think one of the main things is that some people don't know that proficiency in a tool also comes with some passive bonuses. Or, at least, should come with MORE passive bonuses.
For example, the Mason's tools allows the PC to deal double damage to nonmagical stone objects, as well as where to detect weaknesses in such a place. I think that's a really fun buff because there's a lot of stone stuff in DnD, and having an option to "break through a wall" is fun. I think tools should emphasize this a lot more than it does right now.
@@austinpire
That sounds amazing.
It's hilarious you didn't mention thieves tools
Healing magic works by conjuring positive energy. Evocation is the school of magic which commands, controls, and calls up energy. Necromancy has this narrow "life and death" energy niche. It's definitely an overlap.
Oh, I always thought of healing as manipulating blood cell to heal a wound faster or speeding up time around the wound, thanks for the clarification.
SaviorOfNirn I didn’t say it was, that’s just how I thought it worked. Like some sort of necromancy.
@@ghostya-1 if it worked like that then it would be transmutation.
Pally Dan Oh.
@@pallydan893 @Ghost Ya Some healing magic does work like that, and those ones ARE transmutation. Like the 7th level transmutation healing spell, Regenerate.
Other healing magic used to be necromancy. Back then inflict wounds and cure wounds were the same spell with an invert modifier. (Standard spell customization from back then makes 5e meta magic feel like an insulting joke.) At some point they started calling it not necromancy for absolutely no raison.
I'm playing a barbarian in my current campaign, and I told the DM that, "I'm not gonna specify this for every day, but assume that my character wakes up early and exercises for one or two hours"
So now whenever he narrates everyone waking up, he says that at the crow of the aaracockra (we have one in the party that always crows like a rooster when the sun rises), the half-orc wakes up and does his early morning exercises
"I'm recording in bed today"
that's such a mood lol
"even though I spent an hour preparing it"
And that's a mood, lol
@@irok1 "Nights in white satin".... also a mood.
XP to Level 20: I want a realistic DND game!
Me: Ok, roll to pay your taxes.
Nat 1
"The IRS is at your door for tax fraud."
@@neog8029 My group actually has it as an official table rule that if anyone ever rolls a natural 20 for taxes, they successfully _get away_ with tax fraud and receive 1d100 gold from the IRS, regardless of whether or not they were actually trying to commit tax fraud. It hasn't come up yet, but our hopes are high.
@@incognitoburrito6020
you did your taxes so good you committed tax fraud
It's the tax that gets you.
L i f e s t y l e
A friend of mine had this really cool thing, he was a DM for 2 groups, one of which was playing an evil party. He made the two groups be in the same world, at some point when he was playing online, they even played at the same time, so they actually had a live battle. After that he told both groups, and it was really funny. The evil party betrayed the big bad guy, and took over the evil army. The evil player campaign ended due to some unfortunate deck of many things draws, but the other campaign is still going i think
My personal hot take: Taverns are a great and perfectly reasonable place to start a campaign.
Obviously, it’s just kind of boring when that’s where you start for the third campaign in a row
Adventures starting in taverns is an escape fantasy for alcoholics.
I just started a game in a tavern....I burnt the tavern down with a dragon but it did start in a tavern
@@jazzburrell8870 depends on execution. Each time it can be fun, unique and refreshing if your DM is good.
Good alternative, prison.
Cure wounds is evocation because you're just blastin' their ass with life juice.
That does not sound like healing, but like... something different.
@@creativedesignation7880 Oh, damn.
He's right tho, positive energy in D&D heals living beings (and used to hurt undead too, but they changed that), and spells that use any kind of energy usually fall into the evocation category... _except_ for negative energy, which is so intimately linked to death and the undead that it falls into the necromancy category.
There's a high chance you already knew all that, though.
@@CidGuerreiro1234 well there's also transmutation which has a lot of energy based spells
👀👀👀👀👀
Didn't cure wounds used to be necromancy? I know DDO classified all the healing spells as necromancy
Hot take: human fighters aren't boring; they're blank canvases upon which you can do absolutely anything with. If someone has made a human fighter and the character is boring, the root of the boring isn't in the race and class, it's the player.
My character is a human fighter but they are made of silicone instead of carbon so their limbs are easier to break but they grow back
They're not boring, they just suck compared to custom origin. Having darkvision is such a boon it completely overshadows being a pure human.
I mean honestly, do you want to have to give up using a shield or a two handed weapon to carry a torch? On what planet is that considered optimal?
I’ve always thought that fighters are like plain oatmeal.
It’ll keep you full till lunch like a breakfast food should, but it’s not very flavorful. However the lack of flavor means that it doesn’t conflict with the flavor of stuff you want to add to it, so you can mix in some berries, or cinnamon and sugar, or maple brown sugar and it’ll all work.
Fighters have good mechanical weight to them, but are bland. You can add feats, an unusual race, a little spellcasting, a couple levels of multiclass, etc. to make them more flavorful and the fighter class doesn’t really disagree or conflict with any of it. Fighter is a class that is highly receptive to modification and additional flavor, which is why vhuman, the race most able to add in modifications and additional flavor is the most commonly played race among fighter players.
My brother plays a Battlemaster/Hexblade and it's righteous!
@@mizu_shujinsatticclutter536 What the...?
By the quote of J.R.R Tolkien vs George R.R Martin "newsflash the genre is called fantasy it's supposed to be unrealistic you myopic manatee."
Lord of the rings is far more realistic and believable than D and D is though, so I don't think that is the best example.
@@CyberJellos cool, the genre is still FANTASY
Realistic doesn't mean it can't be fantastic. However 5e is just not the system for people who enjoy realism in their fantasy games. Wounds recover overnight and barbarians can survive falls from orbit, among other crazy things. For harsher realism, they should try pathfinder 2e if they want something similar to D&D, or GURPS if they are willing to give something new a try to get all those harsh realism rules going (I actually love GURPS, it has a lot of optional rules depending on the style of game you want). 5e just isn't a one system fits all sort of game.
@@WolforNuva Pathfinder 2e can get pretty unrealistic in higher levels. Legendary athletics and acrobatics can let you climb smooth walls like a lizard and balance on a sword's edge.
@@amberjones4067 Wait they are adding the epic level stuff from 3.5 in 2e? Thats it, I'm sold
“Monks can’t fit in dnd.” Fighter can hit someone ten times in three potential seconds. Wizards can bend reality to their whims. Dragons exist. Yeah monks are the most unrealistic thing *watches a real dude break bricks with bare hands
*nine times in six seconds
Just wanted to correct that, since a game turn is six seconds and the highest number of attacks a fighter can get in one round is nine, four per action and one more from his bonus action. Other than that i fully agree with the point that reality has little bearing on D&D.
@@Daredhnu Haste. It only allows one more attack, but that brings you up to 10.
@@videogamegang1797 also reaction 11
With a great sword no less. Spoiler, that shit is pretty unwieldy at high speeds
@@Daredhnu I think in pure theory crafting you can pull off 22 attacks in one round
I like having a two-alignment-chart system as a guideline. One the player makes to show how the character perceives themselves, and the other the DM makes to show their effect on the people around them.
"I'm lawful good!" *super hero voice*
DM: "You're a lawful DICK"
A Dragon Turtle is just a turtle with levels in dragon.
Never say that again
...or Master Roshi?
@@thothrax5621 a Dragon turtle is just a turtle with levels in draconic sorcerer.
Now the real question is, where did they get their powers from... 🤔
@@DndBirb8659 ur mom lol
@@PUNishment777 First time I’ve cringed at a username, ngl
I see Alignment less as Restriction to the characters actions and more as a way to tracking them.
Alignments should always change depending of a characters actions and development
I use alignment as a conversational guide to player and npc intentions
just this, alignments are determined by the characters actions and beliefs, not the other way around
I use alignment to tell others what to expect from characters. This dragon is CE don’t piss her off
I have a partymate who's a Half-Orc Bard. He was neutral good, but ironically as his name began to get more popular, he began to shift pretty dramatically. He didn't start as chaotic neutral, but it makes so much more sense when you accidentally convince the barkeep to kill his unenthusiastic wife; setting the tavern in heavy disarray and going on an adventure where a dragon inflates your ego. Coupled with the doubts he used to have about his playing ability, all this served to make him shift completely on the alignment scale.
Likewise, just have your characters hold themselves to their own decisions. I think the only alignment-heavy focused class might be Order of the Crown-Paladin, but even then they're usually exercising correctness unless they're getting lessons on how to steal from their local Rogue or something. AND EVEN THEN, it's not like doing one semi-contradiction immediately makes the Paladin go "welp, guess I broke my oath".
yeah, alignment is descriptive, not prescriptive.
it describes your actions, it doesn't define them.
"Go outside, with your real body!"
That was the hottest take. There are firefighters hosing me down because of you Jacob.
"monks punching dragons is unrealistic"
i like that this sentence can be taken down two ways.
A) *they say as a half devil with magic powers from a pantheon of gods with their talking mimic animal companion*
or
*they say as a fighter or barbarian, taking down the creatures of eternal darkness and nighmares with flimsy medieval short swords or punches that hit harder because 'im angry'*
"Human fighters are inherently boring" I need to introduce these people to Percival Frederickstein Von Mussel Kolowski DeRollo the third.
I would like to meet this fellow but I fear the sheer radiant awesomeness from name alone will blast me away
i hope you googled that, you crazy bastard
Just by the name I'm interested.
@@reptilprinceoflizardpeople5797 if you have time on your hands go check out Critical Role campaign 1. It's a livestream D&D show.
@@asf8648 Here friggin here. Such a good thing.
Splitting the party is also great in downtime. It makes sense that not every character would want to do the same thing in the town when the party is, for example, prepping before an adventure. Playing out, even just a little bit, what each party member does during free time can really help flesh out their character and give a much needed breather to the players and DM.
I love occasionally splitting the party. It’s really helped the characters in our campaign get some good heart-to-heart or funny dynamics.
Seeing two characters interact one-on-one really adds a lot more depth to them. Just have it be occasional and not too disruptive.
"You cant punch a dragon"
Good luck doing much better with a sword
That's why you use a huge sword that weighs at least 30 tons.
excuse me sir, Beowulf would like a word, and the word is "aaaaaaaah"
Right? Like, sure a sword is sharper than mundane punches, but against something like a dragon it still probably ain't doin' shit. Good luck parrying a claw swipe from a claw that's as big as you are. Basically any attack from it that hits should "realistically" send you flying. After which you should need to pass a high DC fort save or have a severe concussion, and a further, lower DC save to avoid long-term minor brain damage.
People who claim to want """realistic""" games have no idea what they're talking about.
@@Shenaldrac “minor” brain damage? I reckon a dragon could slap so hard that even if you don’t go flying, you’re brain just got disintegrated
the monk *breaks fingers* the fighter *breaks sword*
"Human fighters are boring"
Well let me introduce you to Magnus Burnsides, probably the best well known example on how you can make a human fighter interesting and engaging
Have fun carrying a torch through a dungeon rather than wielding a two handed weapon or a shield. After all, that's more fun than playing custom origin and having all the same benefits of a human player except you also have darkvision.
Honestly, humans suck. The sooner you admit it the better off you'll be.
@@theraven5850 oooooor... you can say to the dm that you are holding the torch in your mouth, or ask a blacksmith in an rp centred session if you can buy a custom torch holder for on your shield. think creatively, cus thats how humans would think too
@@theraven5850 lol I'd hate to be you like seriously I'm so glad I'm not you holy shit
@@theraven5850 Yes, I am holding the torch, or as I like to call it, my magical club that deals bonus fire damage.
@@theraven5850 you do realize darkvision is *not* pure night vision, right? You still have a disadvantage on perception, your passive perception drops, and you can't discern color in the dark. This means enemies have an easier time using stealth against you, and traps are harder to detect. Darkvision races still benefit from torches and light spell. The rulings do not imply darkvision races just never need light. I'm tired of people ignorant in this concept that darkvision races are purely superior.
It's beneficial, yes, because disadvantage on perception is better than no perception, but that's the only benefit of its perk. Youre still better off just using a light source. Again, it is *not* night vision.
This is why humans are still a completely viable race. And they can get a feat, at that.
If you want night vision, play a warlock and get Devil's Sight invocation.
Taking20 fails to realized that Beowulf walked around punching shit with his hands most of the time
Or Heracles. So much wrassling!
IM BEOWULF!!!!!
He straight up fought Grendel buck naked with no weapons because "it wouldn't be fair otherwise"!
@@kendromeda42 not only that, he ripped Grendel's arm off and beat him with it
@@kendromeda42 I thought it was because a bunch of people had already tried to kill grendel with weapons and it didnt work so he was just like "well weapons or no weapons it'll be the same outcome, it'll just come down to skill and strength, so Imma just strip down and fight him nude cause why not"
The fragrance of dark coffee is a great choice of song.
From Phoenix Wright? where?
@@spencerkim692 its the jazz remix from turnabout jazz soul. i love it
I was thinkin that myself what a bop
You can smell it in the air
In terms of the "Rolling for stats" thing, the most recent game I'm in had this thing where we all rolled and contributed to a single list of six stats that we could then assign as we saw fit. It allowed us to roll for stats without having one play end up with multiple +3s at the outset while someone else (Probably me, I have _awful_ dice luck) got nothing above a 12.
Also I feel that desire for more elemental spells so much. I have a character who is supposed to be a Lightning adept but the only Lightning cantrips are 1) A spell that pulls people into melee with you and 2) a melee spell attack. She's a Sorcerer with D6 HP, the last place she wants anyone to be is melee.
Spells I think are the best reason for homebrew. As long as you balance it to be on par with spells of its level it is stupid to rely on just the "approved" spells since as you've cited its really limiting and also in universe SOMEONE has to come up with these spells so why not add another.
Seriously though, even the most skilled most trained swordsman today couldn’t possibly take on anything larger than like an adolescent dragon, Also if magic is on the table it’s already established that monks are using ki in their strikes, so yes it’s fine to punch a dragon to death.
When getting realistic a trained swordsman also tries to keep a certain distance from his opponent. Below that certain distance he's either going to back off, switch to a smaller weapon, or go for an unarmed strike to force the opponent back. Which is something Cody is conveniently ignoring.
@@Quandry1 As a skilled swordsman myself I was going to say exactly that, thank you.
Getting "inside" your opponents strike distance is absolutely a thing.
Yeah, the moment you start crying about combat realism in a world with magic, you lose all credibility. Realistically if combat magic was even possible, that'd be what everyone uses. If you can't do magic, you find a different profession, simple as that.
Exactly!
How else would the book be able to describe a monk deflecting arrows that are speeding at her faster than she can run?
@@gethsemanegamespublishing8274 what you gonna do when a dragon starts blasting
“I can punch a dragon, you can cast spells, shut up and stop being lame.”
Can we get that on some merch?
OMG yes please
9:30 I enjoy rolling for stats; just as you can get high stats, you can also roll low stats. These weaknesses can really work towards the roleplay and fun aspects of the game. In my group someone got a -3 strength modifier, so we gave him a sickle to heal others with negative damage numbers.
LOL
As a DM I agree this would work until you cheese a boss fight with it, then it's a no go.
@@SuperNerd9695 Oh don't worry the nonmagical sickle of healing was completely balanced
Even if he managed to land a hit with -3 to hit, he had to roll a 1d4-3 for damage. That's -2 damage (or +2hp) at minimum, and 1 damage max. Fair and Balanced.
@@Spahki hmm I didn't do the math, but you have a point, it probably wouldn't be that overpowered.
I can imagine a bystander seeing a group of mercs bloodied from a major fight while one of them is just *hacking away with a fucking sickle*
My Hot Take!: The sorcerer should use the spell point system off base to further differentiate it from the wizard
Hot Take: Sorcerer should have some kind of short rest ability; all other casters do besides them (until level 20, but really even then they only get the equivalent of 1 3rd level spell slot back per short rest and that’s insanely late in the game.)
I think that if that happened to the sorcerer it would just end up with what the Mystic was trying to be an I'm not sure if that is really the type of meta sorcerer is going for? Like I do think they should lean in to their sorcerey points more because oddly enough in subclasses it really feels like an after thought in a lot of them, so like whenever 6e comes around I think maybe if there was more points per level and more verity in metamagic or subclass abilities using those points that could feel that sense of their magic is different and more flexable even if they have less spells. Also any class abilities between level 6 and 10 would be real good to have because those levels are a real drought
The problem is that spell points isn't a system that works in 5e well.
If you give Sorcs spell points they automatically become the best caster.
Birbology Not sure if they’d be the best considering how few spells they have, no access to ritual casting, & no short rest abilities. They do have the largest amount of cantrips, but spell points don’t change that at all. I really don’t think it’d have too large of an effect especially because sorcerers could already do the thing that spell points set out to do by converting spell slots into higher level slots by using sorcery points as the in-between.
@@Birbucifer I play with spell points for my sorcerer with a wizard and a bard in the party and I never really feel OP at all. Like yea I can do some really crazy things if I only have one combat big boss battle a day, but I still have limited spells, I dont have ritual casting, once my points are gone I can't even cast spells anymore for the day. It balances out really well in almost every game I played.
Well I say almost because sorcadin with spell points varient is broken af and if you love your DM or your charcater you shouldn't try it.
If we're going for realism, a small party of people with swords and daggers aren't hurting dragons either. Maybe an massive army with dozens of ballistas.
I concur
The dragon swipes the battlefield with his tail, all the 20 soldiers within 30 ft. of him are thrown away and fall prone
Oh, but the party that consists of angery-man, the lord of the vegans and your average thief somehow manages to kill it
Ballistae, nets, trebuchets, catapults, and accuracy through volume
Euron Greyjoy with one ballista gg
@@Neirean Unless there's only one left. Than even 1000 ballistas will miss.
"Roll health too, who cares?" Woah buddy. That's a bit extreme.
Wizard Orcs make bad characters!?
I made an Orc Artificer who low-key despised his own species, and was searching for an alchemical way to make himself human. His arc was one of self-acceptance.
That sounds flippin’ awesome!
JOIN MY GAME, I NEED YOUR CREATIVITY!
thats an example of using an abnormal race and class combo and actually making it interesting
That's actually beautiful. I had a Kobold Warlock with a similar yearning for self-acceptance, but one of the other players killed me by selling me to a succubus. That was a fun session.
@@thebutterscotchkid2481 | I'm always down to play D&D.
Evocation is essentially creating energies and chucking them at something- summoning some fire-related energy for a fireball, quicky chucking together an energy-ball for Resilient Sphere, etc. I guess the logic might be Cure Wounds is a matter of hastily shoving healing energy into someone, like stabbing someone with adrenaline rather than performing complex surgery.
I was just thinking this as an explanation nearly word for word. I've noted a lot of dms will say healing magic can let you recover from a cuts, scrapes, and burns quickly. But, if you broke a bone or any other major injury you would actually need to take time to recover and healing magic would not help you all that much. With this in mind it would make perfect sense for cure wounds and other healing magic to be evocation based.
It could be something like cautarizing a wound with a fire spell or restarting a heart with a lighting spell
It definitely makes sense for Healing Word to be Evocation. BUT WHY IS LESSER RESTORATION ABJURATION?! lol
@@godspeedhero3671 It's in the same way Protection for Poison is abjuration. Abjuration is a protective kind of magic, and Lesser Restoration is a spell that removes the effect of being blinded, deafened, paralyzed or poisoned. One of the results of abjuration spells is removing harmful effects. Makes sense to me.
I think cure spells being evocations is a left-over from 3E when the explanation was that it worked by channeling positive energy.
People think of monk and they always think Buddhist monks. I love the hot take idea of having the dragon punching monk being a gregorian style monk. Brother George has no time for a dragon to be interrupt his chants.
That's kinda how they are moving towards it in the 2024 rules.
Kensai monks feel like shoulin(I’ve probably miss spelld this terribly)
"From levels 1 through 5 you can just die to a bad roll"
me looking at my level 4 bard that lived on 1 hp from MANY bad rolls fighting goblins: how are you still alive
my bard: *I HAVE NO IDEA*
ps: this also goes for EVERY VIDEO GAME I HAVE EVER PLAYED because my life just likes to make me stay at 1 hp way too much lmao
"Just keep going! You can do it!"
"Ignore the continuous low health sound"
@@theunknownmax6571 hears beeping
"Huh, wonder what that is?"
Sounds like God likes having you in a constant level of unnecessary stress
My now 6th lvl Paladin has been unconcious during or at the end of battles more often than not. But when he stays concious he is almost full live at the end of every fight.
Cure wounds is an attack that deals positive energy damage, which heals any living thing. It's the same general idea of energy control as more normal evocation spells, but positive energy.
@@justaredpanda3283 exactly, especially since you can't straight up kill the person you're trying to help. Positive energy always heals the living, while the arrow bit I have seen kill quite a few times before the healing can take effect.
Unless we do older ed rules and too much positive energy makes you explode
Yeah actually you are right, this is also why you can harm undead with it. Just like you can imagine a fire spell draws its power from the plane of fire, healing magic would work on the same idea.
"Alignment is descriptive, not prescriptive."
On the Weird Race/Class combos, this guy I used to talk to on a discord server created a Kenku Barbarian who was also a mafia don or something like that that sold weapons on the black market. If memory serves, he legit calculated and created the amount of explosive yield it would take of his specialty grenades to kill a dragon and *made it* before yeeting it all into said dragon's face (he made it ahead of time). That guy made *lots* of weird race/class combos and they were all interesting as hell
Much like the fabled orc rogue?
I like weird race/class combos too. My weirdest is probably Haughilde my half-hill-giant astronomer, thief and healer. The wide hills opened her eyes to the stars, and she thinks of life forces as quite like the little sparks in the sky. And she doesn't believe people own things, since we are so small in the vast universe, how could we possibly pretend such importance. So she takes without guilt (and gives without loss), and gets away with it by having a lot of skill in a body nobody expects that skill to reside in.
We have what we call the Concrete Halfling in our game. It was a campaign I ran to get my new players into the game. I let them start at level 7 and be whatever they wanted from the base player manual. One of my players ended up picking a barbarian but for some reason ended up having to play a halfling (because that was the only barbarian mini he could find I think) and said he felt like a halfling would make a poor barbarian because you could punt them... but after he finished his sheet this was the tankiest fucking halfling that it would be like kicking a block of concrete. Aka The Concrete Halfling. He went on to become a legend along with our grifting cleric who charged for his services (sometimes causing harm to make money for healing) because he worshipped a god of wealth.
@@CW-xn1ot Orc Rogue? How about...
Loxodon Rogue.
@@MSOGameShow Centaur rogue.
C L I P C L O P C L I P C L O P
I love having a guard in a patrol that has 1 use of counterspell or a line of prison guards using counter spell spell scrolls that have been supplied to them etc. in my games cause it makes sense that in a world where a thief can make your area explode with fire you might wanna stop that as a guard in a major town/guarding a jail
Jacob, we all know that Cody is going to make another response video opening with “No Jacob, you ARE a younger version of me, and here’s the mAtHeMaTiCaL ReAsOniNg as to why” 😂
BRB Scripting
THEORY!!
Clerics forced the wizard world to see healing spells as evocation because their main source of income is healing magic and necromancy is illegal in a lot of dnd places.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I love this so much. It sort of implies that a lot of the schools of magic are classifications akin to animal families, and I really like the more scientific aspect of magic for wizards
Personally I think they should be transmutation spells. Evocation is blasting energy and necromancy is sorta negative energy. Neither of those help with a stab wound, unless ig you cautarize the wound with Firebolt...
@@jamieadams2589 well there are necromancy spells that have to do with taking and giving life ie “vampiric touch” and “life transference”.
This makes me think that necromancy is less a spell of undeath and more one of life and death.
But yeah as you said it could equally be transmutation.
@@jamieadams2589 Agreed. In my own personal ttrpg system I have made healing magic a specialization of the transmutation category.
It just makes sense, repairing damage to the body is changing the physical form of the wound.
@@caseolum There is a transmutation spell called regeneration.
It really depends how the spell heals the wound tbh.
Evocation spells create positive and pure energy that almost instantly heals a small or medium wound, bruiser burn.
Necromancy spells are about life and death, so they manipulate the energy of life to heal a wound, no matter the size.
Transmutation stimulates the tissue around the wound to divide, heal and regenerate.
Every school of magic can heal, but they do so in different styles depending on what the school specializes in.
13:55 I played as a human fighter who started out as generic hero # 143715 (got his village burned down, parents died, uses a longsword, the whole nine yards) and while he started out as a meme over the course of the campaign he was more and more fleshed out as he got in more scenarios where he had to make choices and he has easily become my favorite character i've ever played
Humans aren't basic really~ it just depends on how theyre made
But even so. Why should anyone care? They're having fun so just dont chastise them for it~
Fancy that, starting with a blank canvas instead of a more or less premade box with implicit directives isn’t always a bad thing (I’m saying I like where you’re coming from)
I have been running a "monster of the week" campaign during lockdown. I've been themeing the monsters on dragon colours and basic monsters with affects to mirror the dragon's element. I'm up to the green one so I thought I'd look for interesting spells based on poison damage. I've only found poison spray. I agree with the pyromancer take.
Vitriolic sphere
Assuming it's not already covered by another monster, you'll probably have to mix in some acid spells.
(... Why are poison and acid even different damage types, anyway, if there's going to be so few poison attacks?)
@@TheHellspawnHero Acid and Poison are very different from each other, there just should be more of both spells
Vitriolic sphere does acid damage, you might be thinking of cloudkill though, which is the second addition to my list!
And I can't really mix in acid damage as I overdid that a few weeks ago. I'm probably going to make use of other things like suffocation and conditions
With the multiple heroes outside of the party take, my first campaign had multiple parties, but we all worked together separately by completing separate parts of the story, but it worked out really well, most likely because we had an amazing DM
It's also a great way to link together games at events!
My dragonborn went through the ringer with that last take.
2 things about my early player days for alignment:
A) I thought lawful was following The Law, not having a strong moral code
B) I attempted to make him fit the alignment rather than make and change the alignment to match him.
Extremely short backstory, he was a soldier who defied orders, in order to protect his company from sacrifice, resulting in self exile due to his honor.
His goal: restore honor by returning the dragonborn to their former glory, no matter the cost to himself or other races.
In the beginning, he was very selfless with an acute disregard for the rules, and no goal to speak of. Then I realized that Lawful means Moral, and changed his alignment, reeling back the disregard for the rules. He still didn't go out of his way to follow them, but didn't actively look for ways to break them.
Then I actually played him, and through doing so, I realized he wasn't good at all. He didn't try to do good, unless doing good would actively help him. Around this time he also developed his goal. And it hit me. He wasn't CG, or even LG. He was LE. He held no other race in regard for his morals, his moral compass always pointed towards the Clan, and he was actively seeking to remove the other races in order to make room for the dragonborn.
He wasn't just evil. He was a BBEG, and our campaign got a whole lot darker
Ooo, that sounds awesome!
Hot take: Use alignment as a guide for what your character will do when you don't know.
Note: Chaotic aligned characters may find this advice useless.
As far as alignment goes, reverse it. Pick the alignment that your character fits into, don't try to fit your character into one of the alignments. Alignment can also change as you play, based on character development stuff like that
@@futuza I disagree. When you're a chaotic good character you still don't act like a murder hobo. You just don't take the laws seriously down to the letter like lawful characters do. You might also steal from any characters you don't particularly like who are selfish.
Chaotic aligned doesn't mean you don't know what they'll do. Like Raven said, chaotic good is more about bucking the system; do the right thing even if it gets you arrested.
I recently played a rogue that I referred to as 'alignmentfluid;' they don't really know what their morals are and change their mind a lot depending on who they're with or what they're doing. Some people said that's just Neutral but I feel like it's more nuanced than that, in my heart.
@@sagesaria I agree with that, so long as you don't use it as an excuse to do anything you want
13:57 Human Fighter: Percy from crit role..... one of the most complex characters in vox machina, is a human fighter, your class and race do not define who your character is.
To be faaaaair they also homebrewed his gunner subclass and let him invent things. Not exactly textbook.
Taliesin is just really good at writing characters no matter what race/class they are. I'm particularly enjoying Caduceus, as he's just such a genuinely nice guy and has such a positive impact on everyone else's characters.
@Austin Hicks And Molly was genuinely the most wholesome blood mage in all of fiction. He was probably my favorite character, and his death was an incredibly impactful moment
I may be bias, playing a human fighter and all at the moment. But I get the feeling that I might have the most nuanced character at our current table, me the human Mcfighter man, because I chose mercenary as my background and chose to be the Neutral Good guy in a party of Chaotic Neutral.
I'm easily one of the most dangerous characters in the party in combat, but my way of playing a merc was to decide that I became an adventurer to get away from the mercenary life. That I'd lost my taste for having to kill people and thought that by being an Adventurer I could live a cleaner life of killing monsters and evils that endanger good decent people instead. This has really influenced the party enough that my DM has joked that the campaign gets kept on track by disapproving dad energy. Though I can't say that I disapprove of any other characters, just that I like to lead by example, so I'll try to spare foes that we safely can or try to talk things out or do right by folks we meet and by and large the rest of the party usually follows suit.
@@LupineShadowOmega Mercenaries don't just kill people.
I think Cure Wounds is Evocation because it's the school of raw magical power, it's where the very "direct" spells are from, defined mostly by having big numbers, wether it's for damage or healing.
Edit: using the logic that says Cure Wounds should be Necromancy, Fireball should be conjuration since you're creating a ball of fire
It used to be Necromancy in 2e
Yep, that's the logic cure wounds uses. You're deluging the target in positive energy. Which is pretty close to necromancy until you realize no necromancy spells actually use that particular technique. Correct me if I'm wrong, there are a ton of spells. Also, yeah, spell schools are more so defined by the technique and mindset used to perform them effectively.
Is that Godot’s theme in the beginning? “The Fragrance of Dark Coffee”
Good, i'm not alone in hearing that lol
Oh yeah it is.
God yes. Best jazz song of our times, next to the steel samurai jazz version.
@@Facesforce next to Dancers5 that is.
That's my go to to play if I need a generic jazz song to play it fits everything, romance? Yea, vibe? Ofc, saxophone? Duh
Killing a dragon with a lightning bolt: Cool
Bitch slapping a dragon to death: Ice cold
12:22 - Homebrewing Spells works really well, like just swapping the elements on the spell you want. Swapped several fire type spells to Ice/Frost for my Cryomancer.
For Example- "Flame Blade" I swapped to "Ice Blade", Kept the stats but changed the element damage and how I Rp the usage.
Personally, I really hate this approach, because, imo, the flavour should come from real differences in these spells, not it just being a different color spell. Like, making a fireball an iceball may as well just be "well my fireball is blue, and different things are weak to blue magic, now what!??!?!"
I want spells for different elements that are all viable spells, but are best in different circumstances, like how lightning bolt will wreck a hallway of enemies, but fireball is better for open spaces. That's a small difference, and I personally think fireball should be reduced to only a 15 foot radius anyway, but it makes them different and have different vibes.
Like, maybe fire magic is really good at AOE damage, but not so good at point damage, whereas lightning magic can do TONS of damage, but only to one target. It may also do AOE, but not as well as fire, like maybe it'll do weak sonic damage. Ice maic could be awesome for controlling the battlefield by slowing enemies, freezing them in place, creating obstacles like slippery floors, but not do as much damage. It could also be used for protection, like creating a wall of ice to block attacks, idunno. Maybe poison/acid magic could do weak but persistent AOE or persistent point damage, but have that only pay off over a long term, maybe as an area-denial focused magic. You feel me?
I want real differences. Not just reskins.
I made a 4th level spell called Psycho Bomber. It's pretty much Faerie fire mixed with Fireball, and the damage type is psychic
So people can handle spells and channeling the power of pure anger to punch somebody's head off, but not an enlightened individual being able to channel ki/chi/the energy of the universe to give them superhuman abilities?
Just a question, why is your profile Matthew Perry
@@kvalvag5934 Maybe he IS Matthew Perry
@@blankflank3488 vvwaaatttttttt
@@kvalvag5934 short version: I thought it would be funny
long version: because I had the image on my phone years ago for something and then when I wanted to change my pfp I decided to use it.
@@Lenny-ue8hk fair enough 😅😅😅
Jacob: it's a game about storytelling and having fun
Jacob a few seconds later: ITS A GAME ABOUT ROLLING DICE!!!!!
alignment can be used as a storytelling device. i recently played a character who started out neutral good, went to chaotic good and upon realizing the evil in the world she had a whole crisis and went chaotic neutral.
"monks dont belong in d&d because it isnt realistic", have these people seen actually great martial artists?
Who would probably break their fists when hitting someone with plate armor? Yeah.
@@IoanCenturion martial arts isnt just hitting people with your punches really hard lmao
@@Bawinni I know. Won't keep you from breaking bones. A lot of real martial artists say "The question if you're fighting a guy with a knife isnt whether you'll get stabbed. Your skill just decides how badly you'll get stabbed."
Then apply that to armor and longswords.
While I agree, I also feel as though a mace/warhammer and a sling would be good weapons for a Monk to use against an armored opponent, as those are armor-combating weapons. Likewise, against an unarmored or modestly armored opponent, a spear/javelin/shortsword and a shortbow would be the most ideal weapons
@@IoanCenturion monks can use monk weapons for a reason lmao. And for reference, a monk's unarmed strike is not limited to punches only, it can be kicks, headbutts or any other strike you make with a body part. When you kick someone in the head, it's more of a "leg strength vs neck strength" instead of "leg toughness vs plate armor toughness" scenario. Armor offers protection but doesn't make you invulnerable. Not to mention that DnD monks are semi-mystical ki-channeling living weapons.
Alignment is a quick and easy way to describe a characters behavioral patterns when you dont have time to go into detail about "the complex emotional baggage my character holds"
Alignment is very fun to play with. I had a Chaotic "Good" Human Fighter character once. I put good in quotes because he was incredibly violent, hated interacting with people that he didn't know, and relied on bloodshed to get his way out of problems.
What makes him able to hold the alignment of good however, was the fact that he would never let somebody be the victim. He stood up for everybody who got bullied, or targeted for no real reason. He saved villages, not because he liked the people no he fucking hated them, but because somebody stronger than them was picking on that village and he just wouldn't stand for it. He barely took loot for himself, the only things he ever actually directly wanted was some odd pieces of the things they killed so he could fashion unique equipment out of them.
He is my favorite display of Chaotic Good I've ever had. He had no code, he just had two goals, to help the innocents, and to become the greatest fighter on the planet, everything else was secondary.
when you have clownery takes such as "monks not being realistic enough in my fantasy ttrpg about magic and dragons", the clown comes back to do a stunning strike then a flurry of blows
"Those combats are only thirty seconds long, not enough to get a good cardio workout." I don't know if you've ever wrestled before, but I can tell you fighting another human being for 30 seconds straight both of you going as hard as you possibly can is actually some of the most intense cardio you'll do. Sure it doesn't prepare you for running a triathlon but you're also lugging 50 lbs of equipment all day long so that likely makes up for it. Not that I disagree with your whole realism point, because I don't at all, just pointing something out needlessly because it makes me feel smart and I like to stroke my ego.
Exhausting yes...increase in cardio no...increase in quick release atp yes. Good for short quick bursts but nothing substantial....i like snacks
the honesty at the end of this comment was a nice surprise for a youtube comment section
Carrying 50 lbs of equipment is part of the training regimen for military boot camp lol. Though the exact weight varies based on what you're expected to actually do once you're in the military, but yeah, carrying 50+ lbs of gear IS the exercise, theoretically. At least part of it.
Just to stay healthy, it's recommended we get ourselves to heavy breathing for at-least 20 minuets a day. If you're actually looking to _maintain_ crazy strength, you'd need even more.
I mean in general all adventurers that are martial focused would typically have to be somewhat fit but that is something i imagine almost no party really does much of and thats training, long travel and
occasional fights wouldn't be enough for most melee classes to stay in top form and keep those high strength scores
Side note on alignment... my favorite character was chaotic neutral... because he was driven insane by his patron. It added some flavor to it balancing the need of self-preservation via a party versus the need to please himself and his patron.
Big brain move: make a character racists towards someone in the party but then learn and be better for character development
Currently doing that now. Also currently waiting for my bastard to be the only one to betray them cause LE and they don't give me respect
I played an LE character who was friendly and personable to all his allies in the party (Because why wouldn't he? They're helping him.) Except the warforged, because it isn't a real person so it doesn't count.
Sadly the campaign never got far enough for this to change... I honestly don't know if I would have.
YES
Or don't and create an interesting dynamic
Had that happen between a goblin paladin and a dwarf wizard. The wizard was old and kinda shitty about it, but he learned over time and grew to be BETTER
I thought that the tiny triangle on his hand was a spec of dirt on my screen and I kept trying to wipe it off. My wisdom is a 4.
Also nice vid
Also also I played a mentally insane wild magic sorcerer lizardfolk names “git”
No worries, i doubt he holds the triforce of wisdom either! Lol no offense
I like party splits when it provides interesting role playing opportunities, like the rogue and wizard break off to a different path but find something made of solid gold but can’t move it because the Barbarian is on the other path with the Bard. Making them find a unique solution until their walking bag of muscles can take over the lifting
Some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen at a D&D table has been the direct result of splitting the party.
THANK YOU Cody’s monk opinions always kinda pissed me off and the reasoning for most people I’ve heard who share that opinion just amounts to “I don’t like it so it must not be good”. Also quivering palm can one shot a dragon 🤔
I actually played a monk and we fought a young green dragon and I punched it.a few times. I LOVE MONKS
Edit: thanks so much for the likes 🙂
Made me think of Marcus Damon from digimon
Only a few times?
@@gavir4379 narcotic fish
The first time I ran a dragon, I had to up it from a young to adult dragon mid-fight (it lost concentration on a reduce spell) because of the monk, and before you ask, yes, my players were cool with that. They wanted to fight a dragon, not steamroll one.
Am playing a Dragonborn Monk in 5E now.
Monks fuckin rule.
One of my most memorable characters was a "handsome" and charismatic goblin bard named Gneek Kartr, he loved playing silly and funny song with his violin and all his Vicious Mockery were just oddly offensive and specific stuff because according to him that's Goblin Humor, like "You like like your knees will start hurting sooner than most" which was more confusing than it was infuriating and my war song was The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
Man I miss him.
I mean, I'm sure insulting a skeleton or ooze to death with vicious mockery is very real! Lol
Just because they're dead or a blob doesn't mean they don't have feelings.
Manuel da Costa undead are dead on the outside,not dead on the inside
@@arsenelupin5424 until you cast Vicious Mockery
@@Aredel touche
As a DM, I love splitting my party when the time is right, especially in more horror-focused campaigns. It can really help with the atmosphere when 1) the party doesn't know what's happening with the rest of the members and b) smaller groups means more danger so it keeps my dumbass party from yeeting themselves into every encounter headlong like a bunch of angry boars
How do you even manage 4-6 other players, each of them not knowing the other's condition? Do you have independent sessions for each player or something?
@@dressigvil I think it might just be the way my party is? They're all really hyperactive and when they're all sitting still together for long periods of time it can get really chaotic and difficult to manage. I usually just have the players I need stay at the table and then send the other ones off to a separate room and cycle them through as needed. That way, the folks who aren't present can go on their phones/do whatever it is they want to do and mess around where it won't be a bother for me or the folks still at the table.
"I don't know if the payoff was worth it."
Me neither.
"You're right, and I don't like it." I cannot express how much those words apply to my life sometimes.
"human fighters are vanilla boring" can only be a statement made by people who are not good at writing or performing characters.
Fighter as a class gives you so many options to build them exactly how you want, you get all the armor and weapons in the game, more feats than anyone else and variant human gets an extra one. How can something be vanilla boring when they have so many options? Echo Knight, Arcane Archer, Eldritch Knight... hell Battle Master's whole thing is giving you options. How can anyone say it's a bland and boring class when you have all of these options and chances to build exactly how you want to play?
I don't understand the sentiment from both a mechanical point of view or a roleplay point of view. It's just kind of stupid.
A great example of this is Percy from Critical Role. Percy is a human fighter with a backstory about wanting to avenge his dead family. Literally the most basic DnD character ever. But they made him interesting, just due to good character development, interesting story, and just being creative with the character
In other words, characters aren't character sheets
A friend made a non-variant human champion fighter with point-buy stats and optimized build. According to the "vanilla" argument, that _should_ make his character the most boring thing ever.
Rom was an escaped slave-gladiator from a distant desert of crimson sand. He often regaled the party with stories of that strange place (which he filled a 40 page word document with) and recounted unique perspectives he'd picked up, having spent 25 years in captivity. He would sometimes griped about his "chatty" wife, who waited for him in the desert. It was later revealed that his wife was in-fact a legendary 7-foot dread-warrior who barely spoke a word, and indeed it was actually _Rom_ who did all the talking in their relationship. Suddenly his comments about how she'd "kill him" if he didn't have an anniversary gift took on a more literal meaning.
Rom was a simple man with simple ideas and simple goals. He was an optimized human fighter, and he was the most compelling character I've ever encountered.
My favourite character was a scumbag human fighter who was pretty much just a highly functioning sociopath whose soul purpose in life was to drink, be slutty and progress the plot
"Dark than a moonless night. Hotter and more bitter than hell itself; that is a D&D Hot Take.”
"Monks are unrealistic"
Alright, you know what basically every person who trains with a martial weapon learns either before, or as part of that training? - HOW TO FIGHT WITHOUT THE WEAPON -
It is fundamental to combat to understand your natural weapons. Even knights, samurai and vikings punch, kick, and grab. Because even with a 2.5ft piece of sharpened metal in your hand, your fists are still useful.
Additionally, this argument of "trained to keep the sword in between you" is bunk because it assumes a disparity in the skill level between combatants, which, if true, isn't going to be changed by who has the sword or not. I ain't gonna to fight Bruce Lee, regardless of if I have a longsword.
And lastly, if the viability of combatants is based purely on the level and efficacy of armament, your sword and board fighter gets thrashed by the barn-sized mess of scales, claws and fangs just as readily as the guy who tried to fight it with a his fists.
Furthermore, many unarmed martial arts were literally invented so that farmers could defend themselves against armed, armored, and possibly even mounted enemies.
Okay armchair martial artist lmao. You vastly overestimate the effectiveness of martial arts. A guy with a spear or a sword will wreck any unarmed fighter 9/10. Life ain't a movie
As someone who's trained to use a longsword, master martial artists are fucking terrifying. Sure I can swing a sword good but damn they turned their whole body into a weapon
@@chuggaa100 There's actually quite a lot of precedence for people with swords being taken down by people who didn't have a weapon. In fact there are entire historical combat systems designed for dealing with someone who's gotten too close for you to effectively use your weapon. Grappling was a huge component of historical combat, so was striking, but much less than grappling.
You are right that the unarmed person has an enormous disadvantage that they aren't likely to overcome, and that even with a massive skill gap it would still be extremely difficult, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. In fact the situation here shares many similarities to the situation a swordsman faces when fighting a spearman, where if you're able to close the distance before the spearman can step back, you'll gain the advantage. This is just much higher stakes when without a weapon, as you no longer have a piece of metal to defend with.
@@danielhounshell2526 Not nearly enough evidence for this. A man with a weapon will beat an unarmed man most of the time. This is not a movie. Height and weight matter much more than anything else in a fight. Martial arts are not very useful in a real fight, apart from a grappling sport like bjj or judo.
ok speaking of hot takes I just wanna be able to duel wield shields to get overall a +4 to my ac
War Caster and you can still cast spells
I want to hit things really hard with a shield
You mean you can’t? I had a battle master fighter with the SM feat do the whole dual shield thing a couple years back. The player was so good about being a control/ support fighter, I eventually homebrewed a spiked targe that he could use as a decent weapon too. He really deserved it, dude had an original build idea and didn’t complain when I didn’t make it overpowered.
As for the AC, yeah thugs and goblins couldn’t touch him, but I just started designing encounters with enemies that used more saving throws
I too want to be a fortress wizard, banded AC is kind of annoying. Its not like an enemy couldn't target your wisdom or something, just let me be cool and be untouchable to an orc or something, sheesh.
3.5
13:36 On the "Uncommon Race/Class Combinations is a Crutch" take: If done right, it can lead to great roleplay and some fun mechanical quirks. Example: I've got a Wood Elf Barbarian who was raised by human warriors. His elf blood helps to flesh out his skillset both in and out of combat with things like Mask of the Wild and the WIS bonus. But more importantly, it's been really fun to play with the Nature vs Nurture argument. Everyone expects for barbarian warriors to be towering brutes, and for wood elves to skinny little nature lovers. When you have one raised to try and be like the other, how does that effect their motivations and personality? And how does the world around them react?
If you work with your DM and your fellow players, you can have some really memorable sessions.
THIS!!!!!! “bland” race/class combinations can be fun. “weird” race/class combos can be boring. and the other way around can go JUST as easily. i genuinely think it does not matter, as long as you add SOMETHING personal that makes your character stand out from what they are on paper.
Cure wounds is evocation I believe because the idea for it is that you are pulling power from the plane of positive energy, which is basically the energy of all life. This is why healing spells used to hurt undead. So yeah its evocation because just like how fireball is the act of summoning the energy of fire, cure wounds is summoning the energy of life.
Is this why splash healing hurts undead mobs in Minecraft?
Hmmm there are some odd things here if in fact you are pulling from the positive energy plane. You can technically kill someone with over healing them.
I believe the official rule, I read somewhere, that If you enter the positive energy realm, each round you gain a certain amount of hitpoints and once you exceed double, you pop!
Also, shouldn’t healing spells be conjuation, if you are opening a small portal to the positive energy plane against someone’s wound?
@@jacobvanveit3437 I don't think its exactly opening holes to the plane of positive energy, it is creating positive energy, as the example I used, fireball isnt opening a hole to the plane of fire its just creating fire.
Though that type of thing can be more open to how the player/gm flavors magic.
The Easily Bored Gamer not to mention conjuring magic from another realm is far more powerful magic then fabricating magic to mimic an effect. I’m with you here, just cool how you could create arcane healing spells rather than it being “typically” divine.
Healing spells should still be Necromancy
6:06 When you're watching a Marvel film, there might be other things going on while a movie is happening, but unless it's a crossover movie, Iron Man is never like "oh yeah that's just Thor doing his own thing in the background anyway back to my movie" because it's Iron Man's story, not Thor's. I think that's how it should be with parties. Having other events happen in the game's world is good, but you shouldn't have another party doing stuff just for the sake of "world-building". Stuff like Doctor Strange showing up in Thor: Ragnarok makes sense because it has a specific purpose in the story, but otherwise I think it should be left out, in my opinion.
Spiderman: Far from Home kinda did this though and it was amazing.
@@carbunclegirl that could be something to do with second generation parties maybe
It can be done well or done poorly, like most ideas. I do think that it is important to figure out where your world falls on the spectrum of rarity of heroes as this can have major ramifications on everything from character backstories (in a world where heroes are commonplace green heroes tend to start a lot more green) to rarity of adventure (in worlds with few heroes there tends to be a lot fewer problems and more railroady plots) to how society interacts with heroes ("Oh you eliminated those bandits, let me just get the standard bandit elimination reward for ya"). There might be formal groups people looking to solve problems... some sort of League of Adventurers as it were. I once had a campaign where there were about 6 groups of adventurers operating in the same area and as things moved along one group became rivals, one group became allies, one group was revealed as evil devil worshipers, and the other two got outstripped pretty quickly since they just didn't have what it took. It worked pretty well, the key part was to use them sparingly and with purpose, and never forget the PCs are the main focus.
6:30 my DM did this in a cool way I think. We were employed by a kingdom alongside other mercenaries. Fairly early on we got in a scuffle with another party made up of dragonborns, got pawned. Occasionally we would fight alongside them in pitched battles. There were interactions. My dragonborn (the only one in my party) kept seeking out the leader of the party-that beat us into the ground-to train under him. Eventually the other party gets wiped by the enemy and we eventually take revenge for them.
It was great building relationships with them and they served as a reference to our own growth. Where initially they overpowered us, we ended up defeating what they couldn't.
I think that if you only want to tell stories where everything revolves around you, maybe you need to play less D&D and do more talking to a therapist.
I strongly prefer worlds that feel like they exist regardless of the PCs. The PCs may be cool dudes, and may be doing something important, but, if they weren't around, things would still go on, and other shit would still get done. The world almost never hinges on the PCs, and there are more powerful characters out there in the world doing their own stuff.
It's just important to still be having your OWN story where your PCs are still, in some regard, the heroes of that story.
There's nothing bad about, say, a story where there's this big epic continent-spanning war with epic characters doing awesome shit, and you're just playing some dudes in some local part of it having your own challenges and triumphs as part of that bigger picture. That doesn't undermine the PCs or a good story. At most, it undermines juvenile power fantasy.
Plus, one of the benefits of persistent worlds like this is that they can exist across campaigns. So the players, in your next campaign, can see the marks they made on the world, and, if there's a time gap, what's happened since. By weaving a greater narrative in the world like this, you can have campaigns at various different levels, and still have a gradual sense of progress and achievement.
Like, maybe you play an epic campaign where you are the heroes in some grand war, and depending on the outcome, different places might be destroyed or saved, then maybe you play a low-level campaign in one of the towns that might have been wiped out if the players in the prior campaign didn't do X cool thing, and if the PCs save or don't save that town and it's struggles, then maybe in a third mid-level campaign, that town might have either developed into a small city, or been destroyed.
Even small things like that can make a big difference if they're recognizable and persistent, and motive not just the characters, but the players to action.
Like maybe in a prior campaign they got attached to characters in that town, so now in the next, even though the characters don't know them, the players have a personal reason to be invested, and I think that's important, because the players are not the characters.
I bought Grim Hollow a while back after your recommended it.
I've been running a campaign from it now for a month and absolutely love it. It is definitely 10/10
Hot Takes 2: Heated Boogaloo
r/unexpectedhermitcraft
Yes
11:16 I really like Jacob’s take on this. I’m a baby DM and my first session had a dungeon that branched off into three pathways: left was the treasure room, right was a trap room, and straight ahead was a prisoner. The Paladin and Bard already beat the BBEG’s hide black and blue so they had him lead them down the right pathway and I really RPed him getting cocky knowing that he has an ace up his sleeve. The tortle druid was confident that he could open the locked door by himself so he stayed outside the entrance of the treasure room trying to Beyblade his way in. The rogue and warlock went straight forward and freed the prisoner, effectively adding an Illithid to the party. I found splitting the party super fun and a creative way for each of the players to explore their character’s mannerisms, and I could generally tell when I was spending too much time with one group than another.
Video Idea: Tutorial on how to make an interesting human fighter. Cause apparently most people have no idea how to do it.
Here's how: you take an interesting character, and make them a human fighter (with slight adjustments to account for those changes)
Give them a 2 handed sword.
You're welcome.
Step 1: Make a character that's interesting.
Step 2: Make their class fighter.
That's it, that's all. Class does not define character. It can inform aspects of it, but does not define it.... and "fighter" is a lazy way of saying "this is a blank slate that can be whatever you want".
Step 1 write an interesting character
Step 2 make it human
Step 3 make it a fighter
I'm honestly more interested in him making the same video for making wizard's more interesting characters. 99% of the ones I see can be summed up with "I'm a bookworm. I want more books. That's integral to my character growth btw"
14:55
I stand by my interpretation of alignment as being dynamic instead of rigid. A character's actions inform their alignment, not the other way around.
A character doesn't follow the law *because* they're lawful good, they're lawful good because they follow the law. A character doesn't scam an old lady of their remaining life savings *because* they're neutral evil, they're neutral evil because they decided to scam an old lady out of their savings.
Of course, I rather not use alignment at all to begin with. They play almost 0 roles in most games I've played or ran.
It does play a roll if you are a warlock, cleric or paladin with respect to having your power taken away from you if your actions don't line up with your patron. There's also the Detect Evil and Good Spell and Protection from Evil and Good, which as per the rules set by Mystra, are required to always work.
I think it goes both ways. Actions color the actor and that actor is influenced by the color they are painted. Doing evil makes you more evil which makes you more likely to do evil and have a malicious mindset. Doing good makes you more good which makes you more likely to do good and have a benevolent mindset.
Practice being an asshole and it gradually feels more natural and you get better at it, practice being nice and it gradually feels more natural and you get better at it, sort of thing but with metaphysical significance tacked on.
Remember, evil and good are elemental forces in d&d. If you torture an orphanage of children to death and bury them in a mass grave then, even if you don't use magic, they can rise as undead because of all the evil surrounding their deaths. Likewise, a murderer who was executed and buried improperly may rise as an undead simply because the evil they are tainted with attracts necrotic energies.
I think guilds with other heroic parties are really cool. It's a great way to let your party pick and choose the specific adventures they want because other people can do different things. It also gives them peers and people who they might want to save or who they might know are coming to save them and they just need to hold out or get somewhere. The key things in my opinion are don't have them in a combat where you're fighting yourself half the time, don't make them the focus of the story, don't have them eclipse the party. Especially the last bit. Don't have them yoink the party out of danger at the last second. Have the party know it's coming and have to earn their salvation. You always want the party's actions and decisions to be why they live or die.
'I can punch a Dragon, you can cast spells, shut up and stop being lame.'
Perfectly said
I just ordered my dnd character, Erebus a black dragon born rogue so yeah, I just wanted to share.
Hell yeah! Hope you enjoy playing them!
Keep us tabbed on the game!
We don't split the party often, but when we have done so, our DM has been really great about dividing the time evenly between the characters :D so we don't have to sit there for half an hour just waiting for someone else to get their shit done. also keeps the timeline nice and clear!
Yeah the other day my party entered a dungeon and split. Half of them died to cutlery