Damn, inflation spiked since I last had a look at Faerun’s prices.

My DM once awarded my 13th level Warlock with a 9th-level spell slot as a boon for doing something heroic (the rest of the party also got something equally powerful).

The final battle came, and the good army was fighting against semi-immortal dark elves and their humongous semi-immortal demon of death and destruction and making the puppies cry.

I used that 9th-level slot to upcast Danse Macabre. 13 soldiers rose from the dead to answer my call.

Was it useful? Heck no. Was it hilarious? Absolutely.

That’s lovely! Does it come with instructions?

At the end of the day, it’s just more 5e. If 5e was your thing, chances are you’ll find the new edition appealing, especially if you didn’t dabble in the (much more polished) homebrew content that existed and has improved on the game since day1. For example, my brother only plays official 5e, oftentimes limiting the ruleset to core PHB (and maybe Xanatar and Tasha). To him, 5e2024 will be an exciting addition.

Some of the ‘new’ rules (read: rules that everybody has been using for the past 10 years without their explicit consent, like bonus action potions) are nice additions, and some of their reworked classes/subclasses are fine - most are an improvement on the original, at least.

Outside of some specific tidbits, however, the game is as much of a rushed and poorly balanced ruleset as 2014 was ten years before. I also find it more annoying to play because of how finicky and clunky everything has become. It has this ‘designed by committee’ flair to it, where you know that every feature exists not because they wanted it to be, but because they needed people to upvote their UAs so that they could reach the magical 90% threshold and send it to the press.

The dip now works backwards. 1 or 2 Paladin/X Warlock.

Two levels in Paladin grant you heavy armor, weapon masteries, fighting style, Smite and additional spell slots to burn for things like Smite, Shield and whatnot. The rest in Hexblade for the higher level slots and invocations.

Because of how terribly rushed the development of OneDnD was, there are tons of inconsistencies in how features work, and one of them is Divine Smite requiring a bonus action, and Eldritch Smite being part of the attack. Because of this (and the removal of the level cap on Divine Smite), the best smiter is a Hexblade with two levels in Paladin who can cast both Smites on the same attack and use higher level slots than the class that should use them.

Depending on how they rework the subclass (we’ve got two UAs that are very different from one another and from the previous incarnation of the subclass in the 2014 rules), it’s got a chance at becoming the best gish build.

*An alpaca with Shrek ears and the eyes of a demon.

Seriously, I don’t know how people can find it cute, it becomes more and more uncanny and downright horrible the more you look at it.

*Tokaido (in case OP or someone else wants to look it up.)

I played it a few times at a friend’s house and really enjoyed it. Never won a match, but that’s not the point - the entire game is about travelers making the most out of their trip throughout Japan. For this reason, the game feels very chill, despite being competitive.

It’s not my favourite board game ever, but it was a nice change of pace for a while. I think it does get a bit stale after a while, though.

That’s not a knife!

I appreciate the effort, but I was being sarcastic, I don’t need my DnD habits psychoanalyzed lol

I’d imagine they’d say that a common theme with your character’s is valid misgrievances with authority, especially perceived as incompetent and evil

I mean, it’s DnD. Fighting evil authority/authoritarian figures, be it liches, tyrants, evil dragons or whatever, is a very common trope. Same with external factors disrupting a character’s peace - it’s, like, half the origin stories of any fantasy character out there.

People can absolutely imbue parts of themselves in their characters and their backstory (I’ve read tons of stories of closeted trans people playing characters with a different gender from theirs, for example), but it’s not an exact science. In my case, I just like playing buff dudes and bullying the nerds bonking the squishy casters.

Case on point: my first two characters were neutral and chaotic evil, respectively, yet I’m literally unable to kill a fly in real life. My third character was lawful good and the fourth one is a pacifist. I just like roleplaying as different characters with differing motivations and testing out new classes in the process. Do they reflect my interests? Of course they do. Do they reflect me specifically? Hardly so, unless you squint really hard to find similarities - but I suspect people sometimes try too hard to find patterns where there isn’t one.

My first character was a barbarian who despised magic and made a point to tell every mage in existence that they are bad and should feel bad.

My second character was a grave robber who accidentally unearthed a cursed slab and refused to return it to the owner, resulting in an ancient mummy cursing him. He became a Warlock against his will and made it a point to become strong enough to kill his Patron.

My third character is a normal ass dude who got involved in a situation much bigger than himself. Currently dead set on killing the gods because they suck at governing the world. Also hates magic and refuses to use magical items that require attunement.

My fourth character is a pacifist orc who’s been dead for thousands of years, resurrected by an evil necromancer to do his bidding. The necromancer botched up the ritual and the orc came back with his free will, but unable to die (much to his grievance).

I guess my therapist would tell me that I hate magic and magicians?

I see, thanks for the explanation!

I don’t think my app currently works with piefed, but I hope that’s going to change soon and I’ll be able to meet you there.

Isn’t the old community going to disappear when lemm.ee dies?

Will the old posts survive the migration?

What a nice-looking fella! Ready to party all night, I bet.

It’s not even the worst thing we did.

A group of low-level bandits, desperate to raise some money for their families, attempted to rob us. I’m pretty sure the DM was expecting us to talk them down and start their side quest.

We mercilessly killed them, taking our time to do so. My warlock locked one of them in our pocket dimension and waited for him to die of asphyxiation, then resurrected him, and killed him with again Finger of Death (which turns the victim into a zombie permanently under the caster’s control).

It became my vassal and I treated it like a high-ranking officer. Gave it a nice-looking helmet, too. We had a lot of fun together. During the final battle, it led my undead army (Danse Macabre upcasted to 9th level for shits and giggles) to victory.

I shall not talk about the Fighter and Rogue’s treatment of their respective bandits. I would normally say that death is a better outcome than eternal servitude as an undead, but I’m not sure that’s the case here.

We also bullied the nicest NPC ever to grace our table into becoming a Paladin of Vengeance, but that’s a story for another day.

Reminds me of that one time the village in the forest of spiders asked for our help against the resident spider queen.

We defeated her. And her spiders. And her whole castle. And the entire forest.

The village was forced to relocate elsewhere. The king of a nearby kingdom allowed them to settle in his lands, but they had to traverse the desert to reach their destination. They never discovered it was our fault.

On the bright side, we got the chance to loot their abandoned homes. Plenty of things the villagers couldn’t carry in their odyssey through the desert.

Fun times.

*Rogue

Are you using a Lemmy client that includes the trailing . in the link or something?

Oh, yeah, sorry, that was it.

It was an interesting review, thanks a lot for sharing!

I read the playtest a few months ago and felt the lack of initiative and the fear/hope mechanic didn’t quite work out for me, but I’m glad that it did for you!

Character creation and sheets are an easy win compared to the mess that is 5e (especially 2024). It’s the first thing that a player usually sees when approaching a new game, so I’m happy that they did it right.

FYI, the link doesn’t work.

I wish techbros would stop shoving AI into literally every existing app. Even frickin’ Windows’s Notebook has Copilot integration now.

What the fuck would I want to use Muskrat’s AI in a messaging app whose whole shtick is its privacy features? Fuck Musk and fuck everything associated with him.