The Last Five Weeks of 5e
I’ve neglected to write much about our 5e campaign.
Which is not fair. I’ve been having a good time.
You may have gathered from what I’ve written before, that I’m playing a Necromancer. And that the 5e Wizard sucks. I find myself in much the same position as I did playing a 4e Binder. I’m playing — again — what is effectively a Controller, and my spell attacks scarcely if ever, connect.
My character is more openly villainous this time around.
In our first game session, we protected a village from a goblin attack. What with the villagers’ shock and all, I convinced them to let me handle burial of guards lost during the attack. I squirreled away the corpses in an abandoned shack.
*shrug* It’ll be easier than digging them up later.
I insisted that we needed henchmen to fill our ranks, and I spearheaded the search for some viable recruits. We learned of a hunting lodge some ways from the village, where we could find some gnome retirees willing to join us.
Along the way, we encountered a dull-witted ogre. Our fighter fast-talked the brute into wandering away rather than trying to eat us.
A little later, we got into a fight with some skeletons that were not interested in being fast-talked. I nearly died when I tried to engage the skeletons in melee. I had used up all my spells the previous week, defending the village.
Incidentally, I had also nearly died in the goblin attack.
We made it to the hunting lodge, and I convinced several of the gnomes to accompany us on an “ogre hunt,” as a sort of henchmen try-out. Our second session ended there, and we began with the ogre hunt the following week.
In our third session, we killed some ogre for sport (the henchmen performed admirably and so I hired them), and we finally set foot in our dungeon.
There was a wight waiting for us.
Actually, the wight put up a pretty good fight. It traumatized our fighter with its “bad touch,” I think the 5e rules have its life drain reduce a character’s maximum hit points (however temporarily) in addition to dealing damage.
Once we got into the dungeon behind the wight, we found another wight waiting. This one was more easily dispatched, I think in part because we were rolling a little better. We fought our way down a little hallway, and I think we closed that session with an ettin fight. Remarkably, no one was seriously injured.
Our fourth session was occupied entirely by one fight and the aftermath.
We stepped into a room where some dark elves were fighting a ragtag bunch of misfits: among them a tiefling, a ranger, a druid, a cleric, and an elf.
Our party ultimately sided with the misfits, and together we killed all but one of the dark elves — the survivor is now our fighter’s pet.
We then entered some pretty tense negotiations with the misfit group. I used the Thaumaturgy cantrip to signal to our cleric, who led the negotiations, since my character was the only one capable of discerning lies.
It all turned out in the end, we led the group to the surface and I had them eating out of the palm of my hand. I have plans for that tiefling warlock.
Then last week, we hammered away at three encounters: a couple of fights with animated suits of armor and helmed horrors, and an encounter with a couple of large water elementals. We were incredibly lucky in that last fight.
Either of the elementals could have swatted us down with one hit — the fighter being perhaps the only exception — but by that point we had found a strategy that gave our entire front line a defensive advantage.
Our fighter could impose a disadvantage on the elementals’ attacks to adjacent allies. The henchmen didn’t provide the most reliable damage, but they did occupy the elementals’ attention. Our characters hit 4th level.
You’ve played 5e a lot more than I have by now, though you’re at the level that the party I played with was around; do you find that the encounters drag any due to the system’s higher HPs or was that just my group?
As weird as it sounds, I think that 5e would actually make a great system for a Supers game, even if it didn’t jibe with what I felt like D&D should ‘feel’ like.
All of our fights last week were a bit long in the tooth — possibly as a result of the high hit points, though the fact that a lot of our attacks missed was a big factor. Our enemies had disadvantage on many of their attacks, which might be seen as a balancing factor to our comparatively fewer hps . . . but I’m not sure yet.
As much as I enjoy leveling up, I’d rather spend more time stuck as a low-level and find more loot. We’ve had slim pickings thus far, though this is more a result of not being familiar with the loot system, I realize. I had to look it up myself yesterday to try and figure out when and why you would generate a “hoard.”
I see. It reminded me of in oblivion when you had a low marksmanship score and some guy would have a dozen arrows sticking out of him and still be laughing and charging at you.
On the other hand, if you think of things in terms of a crit being Superman punching Darkseid through three buildings and then Darkseid stands up and zaps people with his omega beams, 5e models it fairly reasonably.
I saw a video review of 5e where the high-damage magic cantrips were criticized. “Poison Spray,” deals 1d12 damage, for example. From what I’ve seen, monsters have enough hit points that it doesn’t matter how big a die the wizard rolls for damage.
It doesn’t QUITE feel like . . . what was the expression? ‘Padded Sumo?’ from the 3e/4e era. I’ve also heard ‘bags of hit points.’ It doesn’t quite feel like that, but the combination of low accuracy, disadvantage, and high hit points may ultimately prove fatal.
Maybe part of it comes from what our expectations of “high” damage is. What is “high”? In previous iterations, 1d12 was just this side of astronomical, reserved for two-handed greatswords and barbarian hit dice. In 5e, it’s a ping.
It’s something I noticed in the evolution of JRPGs in the 8 & 16 bit era. Characters with HP in the few thousands late game were the norm until eventually everyone was hitting the 9999 mark. Maybe it’s like pin-ball scoring, only for RPGs?
Poison spray’s 1d12 is the 5e version of Acid Splash’s 1d3 (1d4?).
Our group has ping-ponged a bit between systems over the last year. We went from 4e, to a playtest of my system, to Laundry Files (which is CoC-lethal), to Stars Without Number (1e-lethal), and finally to 5e.
From my impression so far, 5e has inherited tougher monsters from 4e, and has blended class design from 3e/4e while dropping the majority of character options in favor of more linear development.
So, if I’m looking for the JRPG number creep . . . I don’t exactly see it. Spells may have gained more power at 1st level, but they seem to have lost power overall. I think a 3e wizard could take a 5e wizard in a fight.
Hmmm…. that’s an interesting prospect…. throwing characters from different systems of similar levels against one another and see what turns out. Then again, a 1st level B/X or 1e magic user would win every time against any non-elfs up through level 4, so long as they had sleep memorized.
I’ll admit that it’s one-half of an idea I had for a new webcomic project.