u/TheThoughtmaker

Complete Warrior.

Love this!

The one that really made me smile is Sunscape Familiar, because I love seeing cards from my early Magic days that haven't been reprinted a million times nor powercrept out of relevance. They're the little gems I want to see shine.

My latest big project has the Thunderscape and Thornscape versions, but alas, I recently removed Arcades, the Tactician and Nesting Dragon.

What Animate Dead canonically does is summon a spirit from the Negative Energy Plane to pilot the bones. The spell doesn’t inherently affect the bones itself; a tyrannosaurus skeleton would have different stats than a gnome skeleton, a scoliosis skeleton will have different stats than a weightlifter’s skeleton.

The 5e game rules don’t usually get into that level of in-world detail in its game rules. Whereas classic D&D gave players more general tools to apply as the situation demands (e.g. a skeleton template that changes any existing statblock, which itself can be easily adjusted to higher levels if you want something like a huge lv16 dire wolf skeleton RAW), 5e focuses more on selling one-off content (you get one humanoid skeleton, and flavor is free).

What that tells me: That is a very powerful mutant.

Or

Negative HP: Damage can reduce you below 0hp. Negative hp increases the DC of death saves (e.g. DC13 at -3hp). If your negative hp is greater than your maximum hp, you die.

Bleeding Out: Instead of a set number of death save successes/failures, each success (or a DC15 Medicine check) stabilizes you and each failure deals 1 Constitution damage. Constitution damage reduces your Constitution score, and thus maximum and current hp (any hit point damage you have remains the same). Normal healing doesn't cure Constitution damage, but Restoration spells can get rid of it all as one of the options. You naturally recover 1 Constitution per long rest and per downtime day spent Recuperating.

Staggered: When reduced to 0hp or less and at the end of your turns, you can choose to remain conscious and destabilized until the end of your next turn (you automatically fail your next death save). While staggered, each Action, Movement, Bonus Action, and Reaction you perform deals you 1 Constitution damage from the strain.

Pros:

• This greatly reduces Whack-A-Mole combat where 1 point of healing after someone goes down can undo 30. The optimal time to heal someone is before they hit 0hp.
• Getting constantly knocked unconscious is bad for your long-term health.
• Staying conscious is a risk-reward decision, not just a straight buff. Improving your odds in one fight makes you more fragile for days, so it had better be worthwhile. You also require more healing after that fight to wake up again, since your current hp took a beating as well.
• High-Consitution characters are much more difficult to finish off, even while unconscious. Odd Con scores are better than even ones, even without changing the modifier.
• Restoration spells aren't as niche, so you're more likely to have one on hand when the other nasty effects they cure come up.

I rolled "Typical Streetwalker".

https://preview.redd.it/mjmvgtph52yh1.png?width=471&format=png&auto=webp&s=36b93e70d95fa690bcd37522d2216fcf75e384f8

In high school, I wound up carrying 14 decks.
Deck 1: "Ew, no, I don't want to play against that one again."
Deck 3: "Not that one either."
Deck 7: "I don't remember that one..." \Plays a few turns.** "NOW I remember this one!" >:(

5e is very much a Canon edition.

WotC says otherwise. In an interview way back in the early days, JC said one of the design goals was to make 5e less intimidating to new players, to not make them feel like they need to learn decades of lore to play the game. Thus, 5e would be a "generic edition", not tied to D&D canon, where only what the DM rules for that table is true. As he reaffirmed in 2021, the 5e rulebooks are a completely separate thing from all other D&D media, unconnected to previous editions, games, movies, novels, etc. And in 2024, the revised rulebooks reiterate that you should not treat the game rules as how the setting works; they are written to let you play a game, nothing more.

This "generic edition" status was one of the hyped selling points alongside "bounded accuracy" and saying 5e would be the last edition ever, with only backwards-compatible patches from then on.

The rules aren't physics. You cannot extrapolate weapon damage nor falling object damage to dumping pile of weapons any more than you can extrapolate many readied actions into a lightspeed delivery service. Damage doesn't directly multiply any more than when detonating a Necklace of Fireballs.

Back when WotC printed rules for different sizes of weapons, quadrupling the mass (and thus force) meant doubling the damage, x16 weight is x4 damage, etc. Around that same time, they printed rules for falling object damage by weight and distance. The damage you're talking would take hundreds of weapons all falling 200ft without spreading out from collisions nor wind.

If you can come up with a plan, an ancient white dragon came up with it hundreds of years ago.

I once made a deck around this, Darksteel Forge, Asceticism, Mycosynth Lattice, that one enchantment that gives other enchantments shroud, that legendary creature that prevents opponents from making you sacrifice permanents, etc. Basically I could just sit there and wait for someone to deck out without even running mill.

All my friends hated it very much. They hated most of my decks, really…

Given that 5e is a noncanon edition that explicitly says not to extrapolate game rules as how the setting actually works, I’m going to follow WotC’s advice and not use statblocks as evidence.

Fighter originally had a class feature where at lv9 they were strong enough to clear a 20-mile radius area of wilderness of all its monsters, by themself, and thus claim that territory as their own. Time to retire and collect taxes rather than raid tombs.

The power scale of D&D hasn’t changed; Fireball is still 3rd-level, etc. The mechanics are just worse and showing it.

Thay is an outlier nation on an outlier continent on an outlier planet in an outlier crystal sphere. It was literally started by a bunch of powerful wizards coming together. That’s like saying Washington DC has a ton of US Senators so US senators must be a sizeable demographic on Earth.

There’s a rather obvious reason why WotC focuses on the most interesting and exceptional places in the multiverse.

Most Wizards are lv1. Most Wizards that aren’t lv1 are lv2. Most Wizards that aren’t lv1–2 are lv3. And so on. We’re talking around 1 in 3^9 Wizards reaching lv10.

The most recent settlement generation rules says the most common type of settlement’s highest-level Wizard is level 1d4-3. That is to say, most places do not have a Wizard at all, and if they do they’re lv1.

A small urban town might have a lv4 Wizard, but such settlements and anything larger are less than 10% of the population, and since they’re larger overall there are far fewer of this settlement than 1:10.

I said the setting of Overlord, where the necromancer cult leader wasn’t even aware of the existence of 7th-level spells.

https://preview.redd.it/wr2lu3dx31yh1.png?width=744&format=png&auto=webp&s=22a1fbc475159eb06688a5f7650dacde70b7b4f3

3e also has actual uses for money, so the 10x higher diamond cost probably hurts more than the xp loss.

Extrapolations like this are why the revised 5e PHB included a section explicitly saying that the rules are rules and nothing more, that they aren't the actual way the setting works and you should ignore them when their implications don't make sense. 5e is a self-proclaimed "generic edition" where the only canon is what your DM decides for that table; it has zero bearing on how things actually are in Faerun.

In the Forgotten Realms, only some people have the potential to cast spells, Mystra deliberately raised the bar for entry on using magic (cantrips are not unlimited-use), and magic itself is a renewable but not infinite resource. Netheril had to invent a specific artifact to basically drain the groundwater of magic, and make several of them, to support how much magic they were using. Too much spellcasting in an area tears the Weave to shreds and causes random magical effects (darn, that cantrip permanently turned you into a frog instead of mending the object), or even a dead magic zone where spells simply don't work.

I can imagine how frustrating it is for WotC that 'your spirit running back to your body from the nearest graveyard' would tip people off to their primary design goals.

5e took away the ability to have multiple domains.

3e Clerics come with 2 to start and can get more with prestige classes.

The generic edition (5e) definitely breaks the entire out-of-combat world with the noncanon game rules it uses.

Meanwhile, actual Faerun Wizards be like "damn, I wish I could use my d3 damage cantrip more than once per day".

Look at 3e exotic weapons.

Elven Double Bow {Arms and Equipment Guide}: You can spend your movement to nock a second arrow. On your next attack, you fire both arrows at the same target with separate attack rolls.

Elvencraft Shortbow/Longbow {Races of the Wild}: Counts as a club/quarterstaff, allowing you to use it in melee and make opportunity attacks.

Flight Lance {Races of Faerun}: If riding a flying mount, it can move twice directly towards a target, then you throw the lance at it up to 150ft (-2 attack per 30ft). The attack deals x2 damage (crits for x3).

Harpoon {Stormwrack}: On hit, the target has to make a Dex save or the harpoon becomes lodged in them. This halves their speed, and if there's a rope attached they have to make a strength check to move beyond its length, dragging whatever it's attached to. It takes a Medicine check to remove it safely, otherwise ripping it out deals the same damage as when it went in.

Horned Helmet {Races of Faerun}: You can move twice directly towards a target then attack them. The attack provokes an attack from the target (which resolves first) but deals x2 damage (crits for x3).

Manti {Arms and Equipment Guide}: It can make an additional opportunity attack each round.

Ritiik {Frost}: A melee harpoon that knocks people prone instead of halving their movement.

Scorpion Claws {Sandstorm}: They attach to your forearms (can use your hands freely), but give a bonus to grappling.

Skiprock {Races of the Wild}: When you throw it or use it in a sling, on a hit, you can make a second attack against someone adjacent to the target. Counts as ammunition, so they can be drawn as free actions.

Stump Knife {Arms and Equipment Guide}: Like if Captain Hook went to prison, hitting an enemy with this prosthetic shiv makes future shivvings crit on a nat17 or higher, at least until you aren't in melee range of the target anymore.

Spinning Sword {Secrets of Sarlona}: One-handed finesse reach.

Triple Dagger {Arms and Equipment Guide}: +3 bonus to Disarm.

War Fan {Oriental Adventures}: When you draw the weapon, roll Deception to pretend it's not a weapon. If you pass, you get +4 to attacks with it that round.

Yuan-ti Serpent Bow {Secrets of Xen'Drik}: A bow with a blade. You can dual-wield / two-weapon fight using the ranged attack and a melee attack as if wielding two weapons.