In my game last night, the party battled against a bunch of yuan ti, who kept spamming their Suggestion spell.  It made for a fun and tenseful battle.

The party wizard used Counterspell to stop a couple of the Suggestions.  A couple PCs made their saving throws.  I had ruled that the yuan ti did their innate spellcasting by staring with mezmerizing snake eyes, so the paladin tried to shut down the abomination's spellcasting with her blinding smite which I would have let work but the abomination made its save.

Panic started ensuing in the party when two PCs were both under Suggestion to flee the dungeon.  But, the remaining two PCs were able to focus fire on the yuan ti and broke their concentration by piling on the damage.

5e spellcasting makes for a fun game, with consequential spells that the party has a variety of methods to handle.

Quote from: Votan;838432This is a very good point.  It isn't necessarily bad: Doctor Strange can adventure quite nicely with Wolverine and Spider Man.  But it isn't to everyone's taste.

Have to say it's not to mine. Just reading about all the spell/conterspell, blahblahblah makes me a tad ill. That's what the damned game argumentation always seems to come down to--physics bending, reality-breaking shortcuts. Discussions of balance seems to diminish when you take magic out of the picture. (Now bracing for onslaught of spell apologists).

Note to self--drop out of that 5E game you're in, buddy. You're only fooling yourself.

Sword 'n sorcery/sandal it is not. I'm still working on how I want to parse my 5e campaign edits to get closer to a low/no magic setting. Just porting over my Birthright game has its challenges because of infinite cantrips, no martial spell counter, and V,S,M changes.

A pity because there's lots of little rules that simplify other things, like exhaustion, suffocation, riding, and travel rules.

Quote from: Opaopajr;838559Sword 'n sorcery/sandal it is not. I'm still working on how I want to parse my 5e campaign edits to get closer to a low/no magic setting. Just porting over my Birthright game has its challenges because of infinite cantrips, no martial spell counter, and V,S,M changes.

A pity because there's lots of little rules that simplify other things, like exhaustion, suffocation, riding, and travel rules.

That is a similar discussion the group I play with has had. They would like to try something more low fantasy like they had in Red Shetland, but with the 5e rules. 5e is pretty flexible. Would not be that hard. Just limit classes and remove most monsters and you are well on the way. Magic items are already few and far between. So not much needs to be done there.

Quote from: Opaopajr;838559Sword 'n sorcery/sandal it is not.

It never was.  It was meant to be for a war game, you had your Hero unit and your minion units and they all went on an adventure, involving resource management.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;838615It never was.  It was meant to be for a war game, you had your Hero unit and your minion units and they all went on an adventure, involving resource management.

Oh, you're joking about my Birthright example? Heh, ok.

Quote from: Opaopajr;838617Oh, you're joking about my Birthright example? Heh, ok.

Henchmen?  Hirelings?  That the old AD&D 2e Monster Manual had numbers of Goblins and other humanoids in the 4-40 per encounter.  The original game was an evolution of the old medieval reenactment war games.

Quote from: Opaopajr;838559Sword 'n sorcery/sandal it is not. I'm still working on how I want to parse my 5e campaign edits to get closer to a low/no magic setting. Just porting over my Birthright game has its challenges because of infinite cantrips, no martial spell counter, and V,S,M changes.

A pity because there's lots of little rules that simplify other things, like exhaustion, suffocation, riding, and travel rules.

Strange - I'm finding 5e fantastic for my swords & sorcery campaign. It might be a player-side issue. One thing I did was incentivise playing humans by providing variant humans with different attribute modifier arrays:

Altanian: +2 STR +1 DEX +2 CON +0 INT +1 WIS +0 CHA
Amazon: +1 STR +1 DEX +0 CON +0 INT +2 WIS +2 CHA

Another bigger thing I did was have all the Pregens be human non-caster: Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue, which players could then tweak as desired. My current group is Barbarian, Rogue, Warlock, all human, with another occasional Barbarian.

You could take it further by limiting class options to Barbarian Fighter Rogue and Warlock, that should feel very S&S. Or eliminate Warlock in a no-magic campaign.

Quote from: S'mon;838650Strange - I'm finding 5e fantastic for my swords & sorcery campaign. It might be a player-side issue. One thing I did was incentivise playing humans by providing variant humans with different attribute modifier arrays:

Altanian: +2 STR +1 DEX +2 CON +0 INT +1 WIS +0 CHA
Amazon: +1 STR +1 DEX +0 CON +0 INT +2 WIS +2 CHA

Another bigger thing I did was have all the Pregens be human non-caster: Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue, which players could then tweak as desired. My current group is Barbarian, Rogue, Warlock, all human, with another occasional Barbarian.

You could take it further by limiting class options to Barbarian Fighter Rogue and Warlock, that should feel very S&S. Or eliminate Warlock in a no-magic campaign.

That's very much like the old Mongoose Conan game, I approve, by the by.

And yes, limiting options can.  Thing is, 5e is one of the most flexible editions of D&D in recent memory, so frankly, it's actually pretty easy to mod aspects of it as you say.

And that's one of my favourite things about this edition.

Quote from: Votan;838432This is a very good point.  It isn't necessarily bad: Doctor Strange can adventure quite nicely with Wolverine and Spider Man.  But it isn't to everyone's taste.

I would say this is system-dependent. The comparison of Dr. Strange and Wolverine in relative terms to 5e mechanics is vastly different than say - Dr. Strange and Wolverine in MSH mechanics.

Dr. S in MSH is still ridiculously powerful. But Wolverine in MSH could *easily* one-shot him, and mechanically exemplifies his abilities much better than his 5e counterpart.

This is not to say you couldn't create a facsimile - but in relative terms Wolverine would be like a 14th level Barbarian or whatever (not going to argue modeling Wolvy in D&D. Don't try it.) and Dr. Strange would be beyond 20th level. And that's a magnificently wide gap.

That said - this thread is silly. 5e is plenty flexible to give tactical players and TotM players everything they want, imo.

How is everyone liking its adaptability?

Seems pretty good. You just need to be willing to tinker a little. Or alot.

Adaptability? So far I've only been playing RAW so as to be fair and even handed once I start changing things up for the next campaign. But so far I don't see any issues.

I'm really looking forward to hacking the game using a lot of stuff from the DMG.

The only thing that I'm not sure of handling is weapon and armor proficiency allotment by class: in different settings (eg, in Ancient Greece) it gets tricky to adjust that stuff, especially if the weapon lists get shrunk down a great deal. Frankly I'd like to ditch those or re-work them somehow while still giving the martial classes some kind of benefit.

Quote from: Necrozius;839344The only thing that I'm not sure of handling is weapon and armor proficiency allotment by class: in different settings (eg, in Ancient Greece) it gets tricky to adjust that stuff, especially if the weapon lists get shrunk down a great deal. Frankly I'd like to ditch those or re-work them somehow while still giving the martial classes some kind of benefit.

I would generally see weapons as a much smaller issue than armor.  Any likely setting will have some martial weapons and the loss of a few points of damage isn't going to sink a class (which is about the worst outcome if the best weapon drops fro 2d6 to 1d8).  

Armor is trickier, as it really does play a big role for classes like Fighter and Paladin.  But then you can always decide full Hoplite gear is really Plate armor -- it isn't all that different than practical battle plate.

Quote from: Votan;839554I would generally see weapons as a much smaller issue than armor.  Any likely setting will have some martial weapons and the loss of a few points of damage isn't going to sink a class (which is about the worst outcome if the best weapon drops fro 2d6 to 1d8).  

Armor is trickier, as it really does play a big role for classes like Fighter and Paladin.  But then you can always decide full Hoplite gear is really Plate armor -- it isn't all that different than practical battle plate.

Turning armour into DR might help?  Give a scaling AC based on the Proficiency bonus?