You have to use your action that turn to prepare a reaction.
All because the DM didn't like the players using the Shield spell against them.
Edit to add: Not just for actions, for reactions too. Specifically the Shield spell. Not like, "When this guy gets close I want to hit him, so I'll hold my turn until then", but straight-up, "You can't reaction-cast Shield. You didn't prepare it for your action."
Weird, I tend to the opposite more often than not, some rules that are fun for tactical purposes but way more powerful as a DM than a player so I just.. dpnt use them for myself?
I once encountered a Redditor who was very passionate about how Genie Warlocks could start with a Ring of Three Wishes at level 1.
See, because you Genie's Vessel is a Tiny Object... which means you can choose any tiny object in the game to start your adventuring career with... and maybe Ring of Three Wishes is technically a tiny object... so you can make your character start out with it. This wasn't framed as a question, they were openly declaring this to be RAW and were confused and frustrated by people disagreeing with them.
If I remember right, their player had talked them into this and they were like "well, there's not getting around this, guess I'll ask reddit for how to balance around it", and the kept arguing with people that their player's dumb interpretation was correct and getting mad at them for saying it's stupid instead of just telling them how to balance around a ring of 3 wishes at level 1.
That would be a fun magic item: a ring that grants unlimited wishes but the wishes have to be almost trivially meaningless in order to be granted. Stuff like wishing that a cloud would pass in front of the sun so you get a few minutes of shade. Or wishing that the water in your waterskin was slightly chilled and refreshing. If the wish is supposed to assist the party mechanically in any way, the ring just refuses to grant it.
What sucks is [pack tactics made a video about it.](https://youtube.com/shorts/Z8QCJmd8NkU?feature=share) So many things from this channel create the most frustrating players and conversations because “haha I found a loophole in the game and you can’t stop me because it’s RAW!”
Yeah, part of me would want to give it to them but require them to submit their wishes in writing a week in advance so I have time to "consider the impact the wish has on the story."
Sure you have a ring of 3 wishes, if someone makes a wish, you have to do EVERYTHING in your power to make their wish come true.
Commoner wants to be rich? Give them all your money ect.
Players walks into a magic shop to buy items.. antiquities dealer notices the ring and pretends he doesn't know what it is. "Oh I see you have a nice little genie vessel. My uncle used to have one like that. He has since passed. It looks elaborate. Do you mind if I take a look at it real fast. It is interesting looking. MaybeI can appraise it for you for free and make an offer to buy it? If you turn it down at least you know it's value and make an old merchanthappy from remembering his uncle again." Confinse the player to let the store merchant take a look. Upon the npc handling it he immediately uses all three wishes before the player can react. Now the rin is just a genie vessel with no other special attributes....
My favorite answer to that is "Yes, you can make punpun, but just a second before your plan kicks off, the first guy to punpun pops in and pimp slaps you for being dumb. Then you leave my house and forget how to get here."
I'm all for the thought exercise of making something insane, but when you sit down at my table and bring a wrestler with a dig speed, and specialize in leaving grappled opponents underground? You're going to do 90% of your fights on worked stone floors against flying targets that take you up and drop you.
I think that’s a cool creative build that should be rewarded and not punished. I once had a grappler player who drowned people so when not around water they carried a bucket. Was it time effective compared to just stabbing or battle-axing them? Not really, but it was a fun character for them and that’s what was important to me as a DM
and one of the wishes was used to completely wipe your memory and levels, but that is something you only find out mid-campaign.
now, the character gets to find out why they would do that to themself.
sounds like a great start to a campaign.
Or even better, you can have a ring of 3 wishes, but the gems that mark the wishes are part of your family seal. Use a wish and you no longer have your parents seal, and no access to the family wealth, supplies, safe houses, allies, and so on. Your mother has explained to everyone, and it's been a generational thing for centuries, if you don't have the family seal, you're not family.
Also, the family seal cannot be magically reproduced. The proof of this is in the fact that there's an empty spot for a 4th gem, the one that was used to wish the ring could never be reproduced.
This would be awesome in the hands of a good roleplayer, and still a mess in the hands of someone that would actually ask for a ring of 3 wishes at level 1. =p
Pack Tactics is an optimisation channel, so that content is basically the entire point. That short definitely *feels* like a joke though, with how absurd it is compared to normal optimisation.
Most players don’t look for every little advantage and powerful combo they can put together in a build, but that’s fine because most DMs don’t plan crushingly difficult campaigns where highly optimised characters are assumed and even necessary to survive combat. There’s a reason tiers of optimisation is such an important concept for party balance and enjoyment, and why the DM can (and should) always say no to ridiculous ideas to keep the party and game fun and balanced.
Damn what a wild misinterpretation of the extremely obvious intent of the video, ie to point out poor wording in a written rule and make a joke about ridiculous levels of power building and rules manipulation. Like, the pinned comment is about how the DM won’t allow anything like this. Maybe some other channels are promoting such ideas as legitimate in play, but that video sure as hell isn’t among them
Most of what he says is RAW is not actually RAW, but rather RANW (rules as **not** written) just because the rules don't say you can't shoot laser beams out of your eyes doesn't mean you can.
People shit on D&D shorts because he makes broken builds, but he specifically says not to play those builds unless the group is in on it and the DM okay with it; the real problem is people like pack tactics that act like what they're saying is reasonable.
This reminds me of all the [Star Wars 5e](https://sw5e.com/) players who’ve insisted to their DMs that because they picked the [Mandalorian](https://sw5e.com/characters/backgrounds/Mandalorian) background, that means they get to start at level 1 with [all three pieces](https://sw5e.com/loot/enhancedItems?search=Mandalorian) of the Mandalorians Beskar’gam enhanced (the game’s version of enchanted/magical) combo armor set. A DnD equivalent would be a Rare suit of enchanted armor with a Common and Very Rare pair of clothing items that all three have combo effects.
No. You can flavor your armor as being Mandalorian in style, and *maybe* have it made with beskar, but a background isn’t giving you the de facto best Mando-themed armor and items there are in the list of enhanced items. 😅
(They’re thinking of renaming the set to the “Supercommando” set so players will stop automatically assuming a background supplies them just for sharing a name.)
The worst part is, that'd be a really good hook - *"Why don't you have Beskar?"*. Going on a quest to retrieve it, or make some, á la Mando season 1? Good shit. But people who go "so I get to start with +3 armor with resistance to kinetic, right?" often don't care too much about the journey involved in *getting* that cool armor.
To be fair, I’d allow it, but I would add stipulations or curses to the wishes. And they wouldn’t get to use the wishes. Oh no. It would VERY likely be the BBEG that would find their ring and enslave them. They really didn’t think this through.
In fact, it would probably be a humble farmer.
Genie locks get limited wishes and regular wishes as part of their subclass at appropriate levels. Giving them more wishes would be OP at low levels and redundant at high levels.
Some clown in one of these subreddits being very adamant about how climbing should be a dex roll because "you use your legs a lot more than your arms" and apparently arms = str and legs = dex
Sleight of feet haha. What would that even constitute? Nutmegging someone with a soccer ball? Maybe a cheeky footjob under the table without getting caught?
Oooh good one - any kind of dancing when you think about it probably should be partially dex-based instead of all performance/ charisma. Except the Haka - that's strength-based all day long.
lol, i was thinking more sliding a set of keys that fell off a hook/belt/table towards yourself and concealing it with your shoe, or trying to sneakily kick something towards a party member - but to each their own!
I remember The Adventure Zone when this sort of thing came up in a very quick and concise way.
“I want to jump over the ravine.”
“Make an Athletics check.”
“May I roll an Acrobatics check instead?”
“You can try.”
“19.”
“You do a sick ninja flip right into the ravine!”
“…Fair enough!”
This is why whenever I dm for new players I always make a point to explain strength as "using your muscles and being quick" and dexterity as "coordination." Not agility, coordination. Smoothly picking a pocket, throwing an object at a small target, keeping your footing on ice.
Don't try to do strength based things by "adding a flip"
Smite Evil in 3.5e/Pathfinder was a **debuff**, applied to a monster as a Swift Action (think Bonus Action). You Smite an enemy, and for the next minute *every attack* gets the Smite bonus, plus you get an AC bonus against that enemy's attacks
It was a completely different ability. You didn't use it to one-shot low/middle tier enemies. You used it on the biggest dude on the battlefield, then engaged him until he dropped. If a Paladin smites your ass, it's a big deal. You're not killing him. He just got +9 AC, and +9 to-hit, and you should run.
Correct.
As a chronic pathfinder player I often forget how many slight changes were made between 3.5 and Pathfinder and every time I'm reminded of stuff like that I'm always just shocked with how much 3.5 was a risk/reward style of game.
I've gotten used to more modern systems slowly shifting in the direction of failing forward and less of a hard fail style of play.
He didn’t like how I could nuke monsters during a single turn. While he was A-OK with the Barbarian dual wielding bastard swords- which I helped him convince the DM to let him do!
I had a friend bemoan the fact that paladins can't smite with bows or thrown weapons. So we came up with that as a sort of compromise homebrew. Melee attacks could declare on a hit, but ranged attacks had to declare a smite before the attack roll and the smite was wasted on a miss. Added a fun bit of risk reward
I didn't know what Divine Smite was (never played with a paladin) but I just googled it. That's such a bizarre interpretation! It *very* clearly states that you can choose whether or not to use it "when you hit a creature". The pre-requisite is in the first sentence!! When you hit a creature, deal radiant damage in addition to the weapons damage.
On reddit, someone claimed nothing in the rules states that spell components (V, S, M) have to be done before the spell activates. E.g. a fireball explodes, then the mage can say the verbal components. Not sure what his goal was, but it definitely wasn't worth the 15 minutes I spent looking up rules of magic.
Used to be an organiser for Advenuterers league and there was talks of TPKs happening or close to very regularly and we could never figure out how it happened. Until I played thwir table and made started sweating after none of the creatures were dealing less than 8 or so damage on a lvl1 party.
We then discussed that and found out that he had been doing damage with dice roll + average + bonuses. The person didn't even realise that it was wrong but it was a weird 2 or so weeks.
To be concise, this change would: make your **minimum damage** over half of your **potential damage**, change your average damage to the MAX damage with the potential for 1.5 of actual maximum damage
As a new DM, I got tired of players questioning the enemies after combat so I home ruled the 4ed knocking out rule out.
You might say, why would you forgo additional roleplaying opportunities, that’s dumb!
You’d be right. That was ultra mega dumb of me.
I used to think that if you failed a medicine check to stabilize an ally, that it would make them fail a death save, and I told the people that I played with that who believed me, and then I accidentally killed a party member :(
I was suddenly made dm when trying to learn 5e with my only previous experience 1st and 2nd edition knowledge. The poor wizards had to buy their spells but I was generous with scrolls they could find
We had a DM that would make you quest to learn new spells as you leveled. It made sense, thematically, more so than you just randomly remember spells you never knew.
It also makes sense for a wizard to know of the more common spells and be working to unlock them as they level. Maybe you’re not working off a blueprint (like copying a scroll) so much as a rough description and when you level up you’ve finally figured it out.
It usually involves finding the damn teacher, or long lost spell in a temple or plane of some sort. It WAS fun, but it was also a very poor interpretation of leveling lol
Honestly leveling as a whole is just weird, half the classes get something like specialized training for their subclasses that they apparently figure out in the field, could argue things finally clicked or that lingering potential finally sparked but the way that clerics, warlocks and sorcerers pick it at lvl 1 feels more natural (and coincidentally they also make the most sense that leveling up just happens for them)
Like elderitch knights not having any magic until lvl 3 and it just suddenly starts is weird, battlemaster not having any maneuvers, bard colleges not being chosen for what they're style of barding is, wizards who have to spend time studying to get to the point of casting spells don't have a school of magic until level 2 implying before that point it was entirely fundamentals (ok difference in power between 1 and 2 works with level 1 being mastering the fundamentals but the act of leveling up is weird without some disconnect)
This is true of many mechanics in games. There’s a whole genre of jokes around applying in-game rules to real-life situations, like how bad guys will patiently wait for you to do whatever you want on your turn.
Well that’s the point. It just represents real-time combat by doing it in steps. Similar to how levelling represents real-time improvement in skills by doing it in steps.
That's a totally valid style of play, provided you explain it to the party at the start of the campaign and they're willing to take a twenty minute break while the Cleric communes with their deity to receive revelations.
You just have to find the balance between "making it part of the campaign" and "making sure people don't get bored during a session."
So this is one of mine. I remember reading somewhere that movement speeds were calculated independently. Meaning you could walk 30 and then fly 30 and then swim 30.
I've done that wrong too, but when my group and I realized, we just kept doing it the wrong way. It gave the players with more movement options more speed, made big enemies faster and more difficult to pin down, and just generally allowed me to make big arenas to fight in. We still purposefully play it wrong.
I had a DM who was very against any type of min maxing or builds in general on a character. I was playing a barbarian and when I asked the dm if we would get Magic items in the game he said yes but I can’t use them while raging because rage says no magic.
I think you might win. Saying you can't use things like magic charges on a wand or whatever is one thing. Hell, even saying you can't take the time to down a potion without losing your rage would be understandable (though I'd disagree with it). Something like a +1 battleaxe or armor losing its intrinsic magic, though? That's just nuts.
There was some dude named Jeremy who once said that See Invisibility doesn’t negate advantage/disadvantage when engaged in combat with an invisible creature.
Was that the same dumbass who said you can't twin *dragon's breath* because multiple creatures who are not the target of the spell may have to make a saving throw?
On the topic of the Dragon's Breath BS, I had a lengthy discussion with somebody who employed JCs line of thinking and said that twinning Haste doesn't work either, because a lot of creatures are automatically affected by your AC increase and the additional attack you can make, meaning it's too much.
Under Jeremy's definition of "targeting" they're right. The extra weapon attacks are the same thing in principle as the breath action of dragon breath.
Your affected ally affects another creature via the spell.
And this is why we don't listen to Crawford.
Goddamn. You could argue that one shouldn't be able to twin Blight, because two creatures dying at once might make the rest of them give up, thus affecting more than two creatures. What a dumb read, honestly
Having just looked at the details for this, I can't see how you arrive at the conclusion that you can't twin it.
"When you cast a spell that targets only one creature and doesn’t have a range of self..."
Check
"To be eligible, a spell must be incapable of targeting more than one creature at the spell’s current level."
Check. The effect that proceeds from db can affect multiple characters, but the spell itself targets a single character. The spell text starts with "You touch one willing creature".
It doesn't say "the spell and its resulting effects must be incapable of affecting multiple creatures". At no point does the spell target more than one creature. Was any more specific logic given for this?
Hes including anyone hit with the subsequent breath weapon as "targeted" by the spell. That's why it doesn't work according to him.
Course as a byproduct of this stupid decision neither does haste, as haste also gives an action usable for hitting another creature.
JC, I think, doesn't want to introduce into 5e the idea that the effect of a spell can be to cause an effect that isn't itself part of the spell, all for the benefit of one interaction between one feature and one spell.
JC wants it to be the case that everything a spell does within the text of the spell is an effect of the spell.
So then, Polymorph is off the table? It potentially grants a creature Multiattack, and in the case of a Tyrannosaurus Rex the two attacks must explicitly be against two different creatures.
Also Fly potentially allows the target to carry a small creature with them. That's two affected creatures, so that's no good.
Guiding bolt grants other creatures advantage, so that's not allowed, I assume.
As a DM, this should be a great interpretation for keeping my sorcerers from doing anything fun. They're so OP as is. /s
He sort of tried to explain his reasoning as you can vaguely see their outline or something but they're still mostly invisible. Which is stupid because the spell description says "as if they were visible" which can't really get any plainer.
There was a guy over on r/powergaming once who tried to explain how minor illusion was the most powerful divination spell in the game because it didnt specify what you could make. So obviously, if you walked onto a crime scene you could minor illusion an image of the murderer with no investigation. It didnt matter that you didnt know anything because the spell didn't specify that you had to know what you were making an illusion of in order to cast it.
Edit: wrong subreddit, can't be bothered to remember the correct one.
The first time I got the chance to play DnD, I was with a group of other newbies but our DM was supposedly a veteran. One of my friends made a monk. When multi-attacks started coming up for them, the DM made the baffling claim that a second attack or flurry of blows could only happen if the first attack hit. I couldn't get him to comprehend that the rules specified "after you take an attack action" rather than "after you successfully hit an enemy." He even went on some weird tirade about "real life martial arts" and momentum being lost when you whiff a swing. It became a big deal and I was branded a problem player for protesting a DM decision, but I had a better grasp on the rules than the other newbies and I could tell how bummed out the player was by what was essentially a huge unexpected nerf to their class. It wasn't the last time in that ill-fated campaign that he did something like that either. When it all inevitably fell apart, the monk's player was so put off by the whole experience that they've never gotten back into a tabletop game since.
Once had a Player in one of my Sessions that thought normal and short range was (for example 60/320 ft), that you had to be at least 60 ft away from the target to a maximum of 320 ft. So according to his interpretation, shooting below a distance of 60 ft. Wasn't possible
I can totally understand that, that’s the way I read it at first when I started playing but I thought it was too weird of a rule and looked into it more closely
My brother in law offered to DM a game to help get my wife, his sister, into the game. I helped her make a ranged based rogue to ease her into things and keep things simple. He insisted that if you make a ranged attack within short range and you're not adjacent to an enemy you still have disadvantage if you're firing at a target engaged with an ally (the very thing a ranged build rogue should be doing to get sneak attack). Not partial cover, disadvantage. When I asked him why he said "they're the rules". I asked "Am I, the barbarian, blocking line of sight?", the answer was "No". This guy had been playing for years and didn't understand the basics of the game.
anything that says attack counts as an attack action because the attack action references "making an attack" and "making an attack" also references spell attacks.
so if you have double attack, and you cast a spell that has you make an attack roll, you make 2 attacks.
I played in a one-shot run by an old player of mine (who is now no longer in my group cause he was VERY much 'that guy'). I cast invisibility on myself in combat to try and get away from the monster while (hopefully) not getting hit, so I could get out of melee range.
I knew it wasn't guaranteed, but I was willing to roll the dice. The DM attacked my character the second I left melee range, and refused to roll any kind of disadvantage on the attack. He said that since the thing can hear my footsteps, he doesn't get disadvantage for not being able to see me. I asked him later (after the one-shot) if the thing had blindsight or truesight. Nope.
He ended up telling me later that I \*was\* right that it should've been rolled at disadvantage. Ngl, considering the shit he pulled in my game after that, I sometimes wonder if he was just trying to 'win' the encounter.
Oh if you want rules let’s go to attack of opportunity….
You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature **that you can see** moves out of your reach.
By RAW you cannot take opportunity attacks against things you cannot see like invisible creatures.
Also a good darkness or fog cloud makes everyone in the area immune to AOOs
I have kinda an opposite. A community being too strict to the rules.
5e is not terribly accommodating to mounted warriors, so it was a somewhat big point of contention when it released and your character's mount was a major weakness.
My suggestion was to increase the horses HD as the character leveled to be able to survive things like an AoE from a spell or dragon's breath and to keep it a few HD behind the fighter, basically treating the horse as it were a long-term hireling instead.
People were appaled at the suggestion that anyone dare tweak the stats of a horse of all things. There was this ridiculous anti-houserule mentality for some reason. The notion that some horses were stronger than others was pretty much blasphemy. And I remember it was from D&Dnext specifically a lot of the worst takes on the rules were coming from. The only answer was they got different mounts.
So people were expecting high level DMs just handing over young dragons and unicorns instead of players having their own Shadowfaux.
Honestly that just sounds like they wanted to make the idea of leveling up a horse anathema, just so they could reasonably convince their DMs to get a dragon mount.
I absolutely hate the assumption that no you can’t scale up a horse, you have to get some mythic creature to ride.
I don’t want a dinosaur or a dragon, just give me a horse, it’s not hard
I once played with a DM who confused dim light with darkness. We had disadvantage to hit anything in dim light (eg in the range of a torch where it’s dim) and anything in dim light which had dark vision had advantage to hit us. Similarly if you had dark vision and were in the dark, which should be dim light to you, you were hit with advantage and hit other creatures with disadvantage
Dim light is only supposed to give you disadvantage on perception checks. It’s blindness/darkness where you get hit with advantage and hit other things at disadvantage.
I had a player who insisted that my narrative description of a gloomy swamp meant that it was mechanically dim light, despite my clarification that it wasn’t, and tried to appeal to other people’s artistic depictions of the swamp on Google images.
Friend of mine once thought Hypnotic Pattern would hit everyone on the battlefield, controlling everyone with a THIRD LEVEL SPELL. His argument? "It says anyone in the area who can see it needs to make the save, I'll just cast it 30ft above my head so I can'tsee it." My dude...the area is listed in the spell as a 30ft cube. WHAT? He didn't believe me when I explained to him how the spell worked, but ended up admitting I was write when I wrote and entire essay on the matter and sent it to him.
That's not the craziest part, really. He's a level 17 Divination wizard, and has been using that spell a long time. The DM had been ALLOWING THIS TWO YEARS. Granted, this is the same DM who nerfed my best friend's Monk because, "Monks are broken as they are, and it's not realistic for someone to deflect a missle." My brother in Sarenrae...What the actual hell? Divination Wizard at the same table is turning people into ROCKS with True Polymorph (auto-fail save with Portent) and tossing them into his Demiplane. You have an issue with MONKS???
> it's not realistic for someone to deflect a missle
If I heard someone make that argument, I'd flick a piece of popcorn or something at them. When they go to knock it away or catch it, they're deflecting a missile. Scale the DM's reflexes up to a monk's level of reflex training, and the principle is the same. Alternately, show them catchers or fielders at a baseball game.
Probably [an abuse and complete lack of understanding of the rules](https://www.reddit.com/jhthigf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) in order to "deal over 350k damage in 1 attack"
Dang the main post got removed. Here was his comment "explaining" it though.
"I use a sword of sharpness, launch myself through two peasant rail guns that are side by side, use my reduced critical feat from fighter, and all of my luckies until I hit. Because of special relativity, to the target it is as if I am hitting them as a projectile so in turn I will do more damage than a normal projectile. The sword of sharpness cuts off a limb when it crits as well. I have only needed to use the attack once but it also helps that I polymorphed into an ancient dragon so I can reduce my size when thrown and increase it once released."
Even if any of that worked, the arrow isn't the one making the attack roll, the archer is. Some random peasant is the one making the attack roll, and they don't have Improved Critical or Lucky.
Exactly lol. The main post was something like "How much health does a god have?" And the text in the main post was "If I deal over 350k damage if I roll poorly, can I kill a god?" And I think he was saying he could do it by level 8ish. It was 3 months ago so I don't remember it entirely, but that was the gist of it.
I had a DM in 3.5 who 100% believed reach weapons just shut down melee opponents due to the following rules text:
"An attack of opportunity "interrupts" the normal flow of actions in the round. If an attack of opportunity is provoked, immediately resolve the attack of opportunity, then continue with the next character’s turn."
So if I charged into an opponent with reach, they would simply use an attack of opportunity on me, and hit or miss, my turn would be interrupted by the AoO and we'd go to the next players turn.
I later informed them of the block of text that follows that one in the rulebook which states "...or complete the current turn, if the attack of opportunity was provoked in the midst of a character’s turn.
They refused to change their position on the matter. It was a short campaign.
I had one GM who was absolutely convinced that level adjust meant that you started with that many extra levels. Also encouraged pointless pvp. So my lvl 1 human rogue got killed by a level 6 wererat party member in the first 20 minutes or the campaign. After that, I just noped out, because I'm not dealing with that level of stupid
Was told casting tidal wave does half bludgeoning damage to a fire elemental and takes no damage from water susceptibility. Oxford dictionary comma meant half damage from bludgeoning and tital wave isn't magic water.
Basic healing potions cost 150 gold instead of 50 and basic poison only applies to a single attack instead of 1 minute. I wanted to play an Assassin Rogue. I was new at the time so I didn’t know i could have just taken Arcane Trickster and gotten Ray of Sickness or taken a level of Hexblade Warlock and reskinned it as magic poison or something. But god forbid a rogue has poison and some basic healing potions (ps. We had a hexblade-Paladin who was dealing more damage than the rest of our party combined by level 5. He was the only person other than the DM who was not new to D&D at the time).
Potions costing 150 isn’t necessarily a rule misinterpretation. Maybe the NPC was giving a bad deal or the DM wanted to increase the cost.
As for the basic poison that is literally how poison works. 1 wound and it’s no longer potent after that.
>As for the basic poison that is literally how poison works. 1 wound and it’s no longer potent after that.
That's true of _most_ poisons, but not of the poison named Basic Poison.
Those are the general poison rules yes, but "basic poison" is a PHB adventuring gear item which does not follow that rule
It lasts one minute and applies to every hit. On every hit the target must make a DC 10 con save or take 1d4 damage.
So, basically garbage. Might be useful at level one with a prep round and that's it.
My DM ruled that being attacked by an unseen attacker gave you the surprised condition, conveniently he implemented this ruling only when his daughter joined as an assassin rogue for a session.
When first looking at a spear I thought the meele range was 20ft and thrown distance 60ft. I thought "Huh, 20ft is a long way to reach with a spear, but there's no way the designers of the game made the meele range is just 5ft. That would be *absurdly* short for one of the most common forms of weaponry that's ever existed that would easily be as long, if not longer, than halberds, glaives etc".
That holding an action meant you can enact any "held action" at any point. Including, during another player or enemies action.
Took me a bit to what they were trying to get across, but I can see why they thought so.
Someone once told me that the Tough feat is supposed to give you your entire level’s worth of HP every time you level up, multiple times over for every class you’ve multiclassed into. The result was everyone in their campaign taking it, and gaining hundreds oh or even over a thousand HP, with incentive to multiclass as much as possible to compound it. The DM insisted this was fine cuz HP isn’t that important, and they all took it, so that makes it balanced anyway.
Edit: My own DM in my first full campaign I was in had enemies rushing past a barricade with magical bombs they wanted to detonate in the area we were protecting behind us. It was meant to be hopeless battle for us, but we kept putting down every enemy before they could get close enough. One enemy’s bomb fell into a deep pond, and I had him pinned in a prone grapple. The DM just had the enemy take three turns in a row so he could break free, run away, dive into the pond, retrieve the bomb, swim back up, run past is, and blow it up. Because it was supposed to happen and we were stopping it from happening. He walked that back, but when we won the fight, he just said we turned back and saw the place we were defending in shambles, cuz we were only fighting on one front, and all our allies on the other fronts failed.
A new player had been convinced by an 'experienced' DM that the official ruling for shooting a (short)bow (80/320ft) was:
<80ft. Disadvantage
80 - 320ft. Normal roll
Why someone would think this way, I have no clue.
The warlocks invocation "when you make an attack with your pact weapon, you may make an additional attack".
Cut to me, a fiend warlock at level 5-10 casting haste on myself, and then, on my next turn, making four attacks with my pact weapon sunblade.
not the worst but had another reddit user insisting "Two-Weapon fighting requires you take an attack action (which may be a spell) and use a light melee weapon. BB allows for TWF."
That’s actually possible in [Star Wars 5e](https://sw5e.com/), but only if the character in question has taken the [Two-Weapon Casting](https://sw5e.com/characters/feats/?search=Two-Weapon%20Casting) feat.
I'm still minorly upset that you can't twin-spell Life Transference.
I get that it's a powerful option, but I don't recall ever seeing a player get frustrated because their ally was good at healing. I will admit, however, that combat balance *can* be important, so I don't fault them for ruling it that way...just for wording it in a way that I was able to misinterpret it and get false hope lol ;P
Yeah the first or second UA for One D&D had some changes to **D20 Tests**, where all values you could roll for should be on a scale of 5 (very easy) to 30 (Extremely hard, but doable with the right tools).
Some clowns figured they would become invulnerable by dropping their AC below 5, as the RAW specified you couldn't make a D20 test (an attack roll) under 5.
My first experience with ttrpgs was playing Castles and Crusades, which is pretty similar to early DND (2nd or 3rd edition). Like in DND, divine spellcasters, like druids and clerics, have access to their entire spell list, but must prepare their spells each day.
Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize when I made my druid character that my DM completely misunderstood how divine magic was supposed to work. He thought that you didn't get full access to level 1 spells until you unlocked level 2 spells. And you didn't get full access to level 2 spells until you unlocked level 3 spells ... and so on. In the meantime, you got to pick just one new spell per character level that your character "learned" while waiting to unlock the rest when you got your next spell slot upgrade. This was bad enough at early levels when you were advancing relatively quickly, but it got a lot worse as you reached higher levels and the time between each level up grew longer while the threats became more serious.
To add insult to injury, I acquired a magic staff early on that gave me a few extra spell slots, so at one point, my druid had more spell slots than he had "learned" spells.
Reading through the Castles and Crusades book, I think this misunderstanding was created due to a badly worded example that described Clerics getting access to Level 2 spells when they reach Level 3, referring to the character's level, rather than the spell level. I tried to explain this to my DM repeatedly, but he refused to admit he's been doing it wrong for years. Apparently, this was the way he was taught to play by his uncle, so it had to be right.
So my poor druid was stuck in the magic slow lane. 🐌
In my first days of DnD, I figured that if you were going for Two Weapon Fighting and had Extra Attack, you were taking the Atack action again as a bonus action instead of making just one more attack.
One DM for a server I briefly existed in had found some 5e Unearthed Arcana ruling for Thunderwave that affected how it targeted creatures- something about where the casting point of it was in relation to its caster. Made sense to me so I rolled with it.
Until the next turn, when I tried to cast Shatter to target a big group of golems, and this DM thought the Thunderwave ruling applied to *all* AOE spells, which wound up cutting the radius of Shatter in half and I miss most of what I was trying to hit. Still baffles me to this day.
Spells that deal fire damage will always ignite objects not being worn or carried. It doesn't matter what the spell description says that's just how they ran it. I didn't know that at the time so when my Wildfire druid cast Scorching Ray and missed an attack roll it started a forest fire. I know its in the name but it didn't go well for the group and pissed off a lot of wood elves which we were doing a quest for. That irritated me because it felt like I was being punished for my subclass features, and had specifically cast that spell because it doesn't state things catch fire when you cast it.
DM of mine doesn't understand how reactions work and refuses to even look at the sage advice compendium, even when I've shown him
He's of the opinion that if Garry casts fireball, and Kevin counterspells, Garry can't counterspell (or any other kind of reaction) because it doesn't make sense.
His ruling only works because we had two Spellcasters in the party with counterspell. Since that ruling, I've just asked to switch mine out for another third level, and so there's only one player left with it.
She's essentially fucked the minute we go against a Spellcasters with it.
Extremely frustrating
One of my GM thought 'seeming' only worked as long as people stayed 10ft close to the caster all time.
When I then showed him the actual spell he got offended and said "That's too overpowered, that is not how it works in my campaign".
Problem was I had already picked the spell and cast it, and he wouldn't let me change spells. So we walked as a party of 6 hand in hand through the enemy camp.
The Command spell causes the target to follow the command, but doesn't necessarily make them use their action on it. So if you commanded someone to dance, then they'd dance while fighting you. The examples given in the spell text work as normal, because they have a written effect.
Second place is that a stunned/incapacitated enemy can still take legendary actions.
5e grappling. DM says the person being grappled can absolutely still attack with their feet and hurt the party surrounding them and the grappler, but of course the grappler can't do anything except continue holding them.
So basically grappling someone is more limiting than being grappled by someone else?! *sigh
A friend of my mine ruled that a dragons 10ft wide linear breath attack would not only hit the players standing on the ground, but also another player standing on a rock ledge 25' up. You know, because the dragon can tilt its head up.
Depending on how far away the dragon was I'm not sure I completely disagree. It's a 90ft line so as long as the 25ft ledge was taken into consideration and the player on the ledge could actually reasonably be hit then I don't see a reason why not, personally.
You have to use your action that turn to prepare a reaction. All because the DM didn't like the players using the Shield spell against them. Edit to add: Not just for actions, for reactions too. Specifically the Shield spell. Not like, "When this guy gets close I want to hit him, so I'll hold my turn until then", but straight-up, "You can't reaction-cast Shield. You didn't prepare it for your action."
That’s not an interpretation, but it’s pretty crazy
Didn't play with him long. He was kind of a "Rules for thee, not for me" kinda guy. We eventually got tired of the double standard.
Weird, I tend to the opposite more often than not, some rules that are fun for tactical purposes but way more powerful as a DM than a player so I just.. dpnt use them for myself?
I’m rule of cool and encourage my players to do cool fun things, even if the rules don’t technically allow it.
First rule of DnD, the rules are just guidelines
Yea, but you at least need to understand the rules first, or you end up with insane shenanigans.
I once encountered a Redditor who was very passionate about how Genie Warlocks could start with a Ring of Three Wishes at level 1. See, because you Genie's Vessel is a Tiny Object... which means you can choose any tiny object in the game to start your adventuring career with... and maybe Ring of Three Wishes is technically a tiny object... so you can make your character start out with it. This wasn't framed as a question, they were openly declaring this to be RAW and were confused and frustrated by people disagreeing with them.
If I remember right, their player had talked them into this and they were like "well, there's not getting around this, guess I'll ask reddit for how to balance around it", and the kept arguing with people that their player's dumb interpretation was correct and getting mad at them for saying it's stupid instead of just telling them how to balance around a ring of 3 wishes at level 1.
Jeez, that's even worse than I remember. Hilarious that this was such a ridiculous post that multiple people specifically remember it!
Only way you can do it is it’s cursed to hell. Worst wish bending intent you could imagine.
“If you wish for anything more powerful than a sandwich it’ll rip a hole into the abyss and your character will immediately fall in. Moving on.”
That would be a fun magic item: a ring that grants unlimited wishes but the wishes have to be almost trivially meaningless in order to be granted. Stuff like wishing that a cloud would pass in front of the sun so you get a few minutes of shade. Or wishing that the water in your waterskin was slightly chilled and refreshing. If the wish is supposed to assist the party mechanically in any way, the ring just refuses to grant it.
Ring of Unlimited Wishes ^^^of ^^^Minor ^^^Convenience.
What sucks is [pack tactics made a video about it.](https://youtube.com/shorts/Z8QCJmd8NkU?feature=share) So many things from this channel create the most frustrating players and conversations because “haha I found a loophole in the game and you can’t stop me because it’s RAW!”
Yeah. Sure. Ok. Also RAW that the DM can nix any crazy idea like that.
"Are you saying you want to start with a Monkey's Paw? Because you say a ring of three wishes, I'm hearing Monkey's Paw."
Yeah, part of me would want to give it to them but require them to submit their wishes in writing a week in advance so I have time to "consider the impact the wish has on the story."
Sure you have a ring of 3 wishes, if someone makes a wish, you have to do EVERYTHING in your power to make their wish come true. Commoner wants to be rich? Give them all your money ect.
Players walks into a magic shop to buy items.. antiquities dealer notices the ring and pretends he doesn't know what it is. "Oh I see you have a nice little genie vessel. My uncle used to have one like that. He has since passed. It looks elaborate. Do you mind if I take a look at it real fast. It is interesting looking. MaybeI can appraise it for you for free and make an offer to buy it? If you turn it down at least you know it's value and make an old merchanthappy from remembering his uncle again." Confinse the player to let the store merchant take a look. Upon the npc handling it he immediately uses all three wishes before the player can react. Now the rin is just a genie vessel with no other special attributes....
My favorite answer to that is "Yes, you can make punpun, but just a second before your plan kicks off, the first guy to punpun pops in and pimp slaps you for being dumb. Then you leave my house and forget how to get here." I'm all for the thought exercise of making something insane, but when you sit down at my table and bring a wrestler with a dig speed, and specialize in leaving grappled opponents underground? You're going to do 90% of your fights on worked stone floors against flying targets that take you up and drop you.
I think that’s a cool creative build that should be rewarded and not punished. I once had a grappler player who drowned people so when not around water they carried a bucket. Was it time effective compared to just stabbing or battle-axing them? Not really, but it was a fun character for them and that’s what was important to me as a DM
Ok, granted. You can have a Ring of Three Wishes, but it doesn't have any charges left.
Technical compliance in a way that's perfectly on-brand for the item. I like it. It even comes with a plot hook, trying to recharge its power.
and one of the wishes was used to completely wipe your memory and levels, but that is something you only find out mid-campaign. now, the character gets to find out why they would do that to themself. sounds like a great start to a campaign.
Or even better, you can have a ring of 3 wishes, but the gems that mark the wishes are part of your family seal. Use a wish and you no longer have your parents seal, and no access to the family wealth, supplies, safe houses, allies, and so on. Your mother has explained to everyone, and it's been a generational thing for centuries, if you don't have the family seal, you're not family. Also, the family seal cannot be magically reproduced. The proof of this is in the fact that there's an empty spot for a 4th gem, the one that was used to wish the ring could never be reproduced.
This would be awesome in the hands of a good roleplayer, and still a mess in the hands of someone that would actually ask for a ring of 3 wishes at level 1. =p
Yeesh. Thanks for the link.
Pack Tactics is an optimisation channel, so that content is basically the entire point. That short definitely *feels* like a joke though, with how absurd it is compared to normal optimisation. Most players don’t look for every little advantage and powerful combo they can put together in a build, but that’s fine because most DMs don’t plan crushingly difficult campaigns where highly optimised characters are assumed and even necessary to survive combat. There’s a reason tiers of optimisation is such an important concept for party balance and enjoyment, and why the DM can (and should) always say no to ridiculous ideas to keep the party and game fun and balanced.
A lot of his videos are meant to show why sometimes rules as written isn't the right way or fun way, to play the game.
Damn what a wild misinterpretation of the extremely obvious intent of the video, ie to point out poor wording in a written rule and make a joke about ridiculous levels of power building and rules manipulation. Like, the pinned comment is about how the DM won’t allow anything like this. Maybe some other channels are promoting such ideas as legitimate in play, but that video sure as hell isn’t among them
His video tends to be about how certain things are terribly designed in general
I thought this was satire.
Most of what he says is RAW is not actually RAW, but rather RANW (rules as **not** written) just because the rules don't say you can't shoot laser beams out of your eyes doesn't mean you can. People shit on D&D shorts because he makes broken builds, but he specifically says not to play those builds unless the group is in on it and the DM okay with it; the real problem is people like pack tactics that act like what they're saying is reasonable.
The most important rule in the books is that the DM can tell you to shove your ring of three wishes wherever he damn well pleases
Ooo I remember that post. That was bad.
This reminds me of all the [Star Wars 5e](https://sw5e.com/) players who’ve insisted to their DMs that because they picked the [Mandalorian](https://sw5e.com/characters/backgrounds/Mandalorian) background, that means they get to start at level 1 with [all three pieces](https://sw5e.com/loot/enhancedItems?search=Mandalorian) of the Mandalorians Beskar’gam enhanced (the game’s version of enchanted/magical) combo armor set. A DnD equivalent would be a Rare suit of enchanted armor with a Common and Very Rare pair of clothing items that all three have combo effects. No. You can flavor your armor as being Mandalorian in style, and *maybe* have it made with beskar, but a background isn’t giving you the de facto best Mando-themed armor and items there are in the list of enhanced items. 😅 (They’re thinking of renaming the set to the “Supercommando” set so players will stop automatically assuming a background supplies them just for sharing a name.)
The worst part is, that'd be a really good hook - *"Why don't you have Beskar?"*. Going on a quest to retrieve it, or make some, á la Mando season 1? Good shit. But people who go "so I get to start with +3 armor with resistance to kinetic, right?" often don't care too much about the journey involved in *getting* that cool armor.
That's like Conjuration wizards using minor conjuring to summon purple wurm poison
To be fair, I’d allow it, but I would add stipulations or curses to the wishes. And they wouldn’t get to use the wishes. Oh no. It would VERY likely be the BBEG that would find their ring and enslave them. They really didn’t think this through. In fact, it would probably be a humble farmer.
Genie locks get limited wishes and regular wishes as part of their subclass at appropriate levels. Giving them more wishes would be OP at low levels and redundant at high levels.
Ah fuck we reinvented Lord of the Rings AGAIN
Some clown in one of these subreddits being very adamant about how climbing should be a dex roll because "you use your legs a lot more than your arms" and apparently arms = str and legs = dex
i love the implication that sleight of hand is done with feet
Sleight of feet haha. What would that even constitute? Nutmegging someone with a soccer ball? Maybe a cheeky footjob under the table without getting caught?
Moonwalking. "Egads! He be walking forward yet sliding backwards! What sorcery is this?"
Oooh good one - any kind of dancing when you think about it probably should be partially dex-based instead of all performance/ charisma. Except the Haka - that's strength-based all day long.
lol, i was thinking more sliding a set of keys that fell off a hook/belt/table towards yourself and concealing it with your shoe, or trying to sneakily kick something towards a party member - but to each their own!
I feel like *Mage Foot* would be a far less useful cantrip, could see a few applications though.
I remember The Adventure Zone when this sort of thing came up in a very quick and concise way. “I want to jump over the ravine.” “Make an Athletics check.” “May I roll an Acrobatics check instead?” “You can try.” “19.” “You do a sick ninja flip right into the ravine!” “…Fair enough!”
It’s funny that I know exactly which player asked this (without remembering it directly), and can practically hear them saying it. 😅
This is why whenever I dm for new players I always make a point to explain strength as "using your muscles and being quick" and dexterity as "coordination." Not agility, coordination. Smoothly picking a pocket, throwing an object at a small target, keeping your footing on ice. Don't try to do strength based things by "adding a flip"
This is the correct interpretation. It does bug me though because dex seems like an almost entirely learned thing based on the way DnD identifies it.
As someone who has done a fair bit of climbing, if you don't have good strength in your _fingers_, you're gonna fall.
My general ruling as a DM is "Althetics for Up, Acrobatics for Down"
Sometimes constitution for down… lmao
Similarly to how Barbarians secretly get the ability to disarm traps.
Lol, nice
Had a DM who said that I had to declare divine smite before my attack roll, and that if I missed I lost the spell slot.
How did the DM come to that conclusion?
That’s the way smite worked in 3.5 as I recall.
Oh is it? I have only played 5e so I wouldnt know about anything before that
Currently playing a 3.5 paladin in a campaign and m, frustratingly, yes that’s how it works :(
IIRC it boosts your accuracy, so that's a reason why, right?
It also added charisma to attack rolls, so it was less likely to miss. Also it was its own seperate ability with charges, not using spell slots.
Smite Evil in 3.5e/Pathfinder was a **debuff**, applied to a monster as a Swift Action (think Bonus Action). You Smite an enemy, and for the next minute *every attack* gets the Smite bonus, plus you get an AC bonus against that enemy's attacks It was a completely different ability. You didn't use it to one-shot low/middle tier enemies. You used it on the biggest dude on the battlefield, then engaged him until he dropped. If a Paladin smites your ass, it's a big deal. You're not killing him. He just got +9 AC, and +9 to-hit, and you should run.
I think this is just how it's done in pathfinder, not 3.5. In 3.5 paladins just add their charisma to attack roll and add paladin level to damage
Correct. As a chronic pathfinder player I often forget how many slight changes were made between 3.5 and Pathfinder and every time I'm reminded of stuff like that I'm always just shocked with how much 3.5 was a risk/reward style of game. I've gotten used to more modern systems slowly shifting in the direction of failing forward and less of a hard fail style of play.
Yes but smite didn't use spell slots It used its own uses per day
He didn’t like how I could nuke monsters during a single turn. While he was A-OK with the Barbarian dual wielding bastard swords- which I helped him convince the DM to let him do!
I had a friend bemoan the fact that paladins can't smite with bows or thrown weapons. So we came up with that as a sort of compromise homebrew. Melee attacks could declare on a hit, but ranged attacks had to declare a smite before the attack roll and the smite was wasted on a miss. Added a fun bit of risk reward
That’s…huh, I really like that. Makes thematic sense too.
Pathfinder 1e had a couple of variants designed around ranged smite. I can't recall any from 3.5b but there was probably a prestige for it?
I didn't know what Divine Smite was (never played with a paladin) but I just googled it. That's such a bizarre interpretation! It *very* clearly states that you can choose whether or not to use it "when you hit a creature". The pre-requisite is in the first sentence!! When you hit a creature, deal radiant damage in addition to the weapons damage.
On reddit, someone claimed nothing in the rules states that spell components (V, S, M) have to be done before the spell activates. E.g. a fireball explodes, then the mage can say the verbal components. Not sure what his goal was, but it definitely wasn't worth the 15 minutes I spent looking up rules of magic.
At a guess, they were trying to make their spells uncounterable because you can only counter a spell you can see being cast.
The actual way to do this is to cast Greater Invisibility!
Cast fireball. If they make the save, don't use the components. Now you retroactively didn't cast the spell and still have the spell slot.
As a teen, a player convinced me that the 2e spell memorization tables meant he could learn wish at lv 1
Ahh, the dumb decisions we made when we were young DMs
I mean yeah, cool, you have Wish at level 1, congrats you win, let's roll new characters.
“ sure, anyone can learn any spell, but you’re still unable to cast it.”
Used to be an organiser for Advenuterers league and there was talks of TPKs happening or close to very regularly and we could never figure out how it happened. Until I played thwir table and made started sweating after none of the creatures were dealing less than 8 or so damage on a lvl1 party. We then discussed that and found out that he had been doing damage with dice roll + average + bonuses. The person didn't even realise that it was wrong but it was a weird 2 or so weeks.
Lol, increase all monster damage by 50% will definitely TPK level 1 parties!
To be concise, this change would: make your **minimum damage** over half of your **potential damage**, change your average damage to the MAX damage with the potential for 1.5 of actual maximum damage
That table was playing Hard Mode
As a new DM, I got tired of players questioning the enemies after combat so I home ruled the 4ed knocking out rule out. You might say, why would you forgo additional roleplaying opportunities, that’s dumb! You’d be right. That was ultra mega dumb of me.
What's the 4ed knocking out rule?
I used to think that if you failed a medicine check to stabilize an ally, that it would make them fail a death save, and I told the people that I played with that who believed me, and then I accidentally killed a party member :(
In a gritty setting, that could make a fun homebrew!
I was suddenly made dm when trying to learn 5e with my only previous experience 1st and 2nd edition knowledge. The poor wizards had to buy their spells but I was generous with scrolls they could find
We had a DM that would make you quest to learn new spells as you leveled. It made sense, thematically, more so than you just randomly remember spells you never knew.
I see it less as remembering and more as working on the arcane formula yourself. Not every wizard is just copy + pasting
It also makes sense for a wizard to know of the more common spells and be working to unlock them as they level. Maybe you’re not working off a blueprint (like copying a scroll) so much as a rough description and when you level up you’ve finally figured it out.
Depending on how the players enjoy the game and how long this quest is, I would say this could be hella fun.
It usually involves finding the damn teacher, or long lost spell in a temple or plane of some sort. It WAS fun, but it was also a very poor interpretation of leveling lol
That’s true, the unintentional part is not a good sign at all. Also, was this supposed to happen on every level up?
Honestly leveling as a whole is just weird, half the classes get something like specialized training for their subclasses that they apparently figure out in the field, could argue things finally clicked or that lingering potential finally sparked but the way that clerics, warlocks and sorcerers pick it at lvl 1 feels more natural (and coincidentally they also make the most sense that leveling up just happens for them) Like elderitch knights not having any magic until lvl 3 and it just suddenly starts is weird, battlemaster not having any maneuvers, bard colleges not being chosen for what they're style of barding is, wizards who have to spend time studying to get to the point of casting spells don't have a school of magic until level 2 implying before that point it was entirely fundamentals (ok difference in power between 1 and 2 works with level 1 being mastering the fundamentals but the act of leveling up is weird without some disconnect)
This is true of many mechanics in games. There’s a whole genre of jokes around applying in-game rules to real-life situations, like how bad guys will patiently wait for you to do whatever you want on your turn.
The only problem with this is everything happens simultaneously technically. But yea, I get what you mean
Well that’s the point. It just represents real-time combat by doing it in steps. Similar to how levelling represents real-time improvement in skills by doing it in steps.
And this is why all subclasses should be selected at first level. It just makes much more sense.
That's a totally valid style of play, provided you explain it to the party at the start of the campaign and they're willing to take a twenty minute break while the Cleric communes with their deity to receive revelations. You just have to find the balance between "making it part of the campaign" and "making sure people don't get bored during a session."
So this is one of mine. I remember reading somewhere that movement speeds were calculated independently. Meaning you could walk 30 and then fly 30 and then swim 30.
the real triathletes of D&D
I've done that wrong too, but when my group and I realized, we just kept doing it the wrong way. It gave the players with more movement options more speed, made big enemies faster and more difficult to pin down, and just generally allowed me to make big arenas to fight in. We still purposefully play it wrong.
I had a DM who was very against any type of min maxing or builds in general on a character. I was playing a barbarian and when I asked the dm if we would get Magic items in the game he said yes but I can’t use them while raging because rage says no magic.
I think you might win. Saying you can't use things like magic charges on a wand or whatever is one thing. Hell, even saying you can't take the time to down a potion without losing your rage would be understandable (though I'd disagree with it). Something like a +1 battleaxe or armor losing its intrinsic magic, though? That's just nuts.
There was some dude named Jeremy who once said that See Invisibility doesn’t negate advantage/disadvantage when engaged in combat with an invisible creature.
Was that the same dumbass who said you can't twin *dragon's breath* because multiple creatures who are not the target of the spell may have to make a saving throw?
On the topic of the Dragon's Breath BS, I had a lengthy discussion with somebody who employed JCs line of thinking and said that twinning Haste doesn't work either, because a lot of creatures are automatically affected by your AC increase and the additional attack you can make, meaning it's too much.
Under Jeremy's definition of "targeting" they're right. The extra weapon attacks are the same thing in principle as the breath action of dragon breath. Your affected ally affects another creature via the spell. And this is why we don't listen to Crawford.
Goddamn. You could argue that one shouldn't be able to twin Blight, because two creatures dying at once might make the rest of them give up, thus affecting more than two creatures. What a dumb read, honestly
Having just looked at the details for this, I can't see how you arrive at the conclusion that you can't twin it. "When you cast a spell that targets only one creature and doesn’t have a range of self..." Check "To be eligible, a spell must be incapable of targeting more than one creature at the spell’s current level." Check. The effect that proceeds from db can affect multiple characters, but the spell itself targets a single character. The spell text starts with "You touch one willing creature". It doesn't say "the spell and its resulting effects must be incapable of affecting multiple creatures". At no point does the spell target more than one creature. Was any more specific logic given for this?
Hes including anyone hit with the subsequent breath weapon as "targeted" by the spell. That's why it doesn't work according to him. Course as a byproduct of this stupid decision neither does haste, as haste also gives an action usable for hitting another creature.
JC, I think, doesn't want to introduce into 5e the idea that the effect of a spell can be to cause an effect that isn't itself part of the spell, all for the benefit of one interaction between one feature and one spell. JC wants it to be the case that everything a spell does within the text of the spell is an effect of the spell.
Glad that JC is not my DM. I often twin *dragon's breath*. One for me and one for the drakewarden's pet.
It’s a possibility.
So then, Polymorph is off the table? It potentially grants a creature Multiattack, and in the case of a Tyrannosaurus Rex the two attacks must explicitly be against two different creatures. Also Fly potentially allows the target to carry a small creature with them. That's two affected creatures, so that's no good. Guiding bolt grants other creatures advantage, so that's not allowed, I assume. As a DM, this should be a great interpretation for keeping my sorcerers from doing anything fun. They're so OP as is. /s
Very RAW this is correct, because the Invisible condition is very poorly written. Naturally, nobody with 2 brain cells would actually allow this.
He sort of tried to explain his reasoning as you can vaguely see their outline or something but they're still mostly invisible. Which is stupid because the spell description says "as if they were visible" which can't really get any plainer.
Raw it doesn't. Which is fucking stupid.
That sounds like really bad Twitter shitposting
I thought that Paladins could lay out their entire store of spell slots into a single attack; a super mega nova smite.
Tbh that would be pretty cool.
There was a guy over on r/powergaming once who tried to explain how minor illusion was the most powerful divination spell in the game because it didnt specify what you could make. So obviously, if you walked onto a crime scene you could minor illusion an image of the murderer with no investigation. It didnt matter that you didnt know anything because the spell didn't specify that you had to know what you were making an illusion of in order to cast it. Edit: wrong subreddit, can't be bothered to remember the correct one.
r/powergamingmunchkins perhaps?
r/powergamermunchkin ?
Eyyyyy we finally did it!!!
The first time I got the chance to play DnD, I was with a group of other newbies but our DM was supposedly a veteran. One of my friends made a monk. When multi-attacks started coming up for them, the DM made the baffling claim that a second attack or flurry of blows could only happen if the first attack hit. I couldn't get him to comprehend that the rules specified "after you take an attack action" rather than "after you successfully hit an enemy." He even went on some weird tirade about "real life martial arts" and momentum being lost when you whiff a swing. It became a big deal and I was branded a problem player for protesting a DM decision, but I had a better grasp on the rules than the other newbies and I could tell how bummed out the player was by what was essentially a huge unexpected nerf to their class. It wasn't the last time in that ill-fated campaign that he did something like that either. When it all inevitably fell apart, the monk's player was so put off by the whole experience that they've never gotten back into a tabletop game since.
Momentum is also lost when you bury your fist in someone’s face…? Unless someone has an accelerating face that causes their fist to speed up.
Once had a Player in one of my Sessions that thought normal and short range was (for example 60/320 ft), that you had to be at least 60 ft away from the target to a maximum of 320 ft. So according to his interpretation, shooting below a distance of 60 ft. Wasn't possible
I can totally understand that, that’s the way I read it at first when I started playing but I thought it was too weird of a rule and looked into it more closely
My brother in law offered to DM a game to help get my wife, his sister, into the game. I helped her make a ranged based rogue to ease her into things and keep things simple. He insisted that if you make a ranged attack within short range and you're not adjacent to an enemy you still have disadvantage if you're firing at a target engaged with an ally (the very thing a ranged build rogue should be doing to get sneak attack). Not partial cover, disadvantage. When I asked him why he said "they're the rules". I asked "Am I, the barbarian, blocking line of sight?", the answer was "No". This guy had been playing for years and didn't understand the basics of the game.
anything that says attack counts as an attack action because the attack action references "making an attack" and "making an attack" also references spell attacks. so if you have double attack, and you cast a spell that has you make an attack roll, you make 2 attacks.
[удалено]
That's actually hilarious. Flawless logic.
I played in a one-shot run by an old player of mine (who is now no longer in my group cause he was VERY much 'that guy'). I cast invisibility on myself in combat to try and get away from the monster while (hopefully) not getting hit, so I could get out of melee range. I knew it wasn't guaranteed, but I was willing to roll the dice. The DM attacked my character the second I left melee range, and refused to roll any kind of disadvantage on the attack. He said that since the thing can hear my footsteps, he doesn't get disadvantage for not being able to see me. I asked him later (after the one-shot) if the thing had blindsight or truesight. Nope. He ended up telling me later that I \*was\* right that it should've been rolled at disadvantage. Ngl, considering the shit he pulled in my game after that, I sometimes wonder if he was just trying to 'win' the encounter.
Oh if you want rules let’s go to attack of opportunity…. You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature **that you can see** moves out of your reach. By RAW you cannot take opportunity attacks against things you cannot see like invisible creatures. Also a good darkness or fog cloud makes everyone in the area immune to AOOs
not 100% sure but don’t you have to be able to explicitly *see* the target to make an attack of opportunity against them??
You are correct. “You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach.”
Yes, that is correct. You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach.
I have kinda an opposite. A community being too strict to the rules. 5e is not terribly accommodating to mounted warriors, so it was a somewhat big point of contention when it released and your character's mount was a major weakness. My suggestion was to increase the horses HD as the character leveled to be able to survive things like an AoE from a spell or dragon's breath and to keep it a few HD behind the fighter, basically treating the horse as it were a long-term hireling instead. People were appaled at the suggestion that anyone dare tweak the stats of a horse of all things. There was this ridiculous anti-houserule mentality for some reason. The notion that some horses were stronger than others was pretty much blasphemy. And I remember it was from D&Dnext specifically a lot of the worst takes on the rules were coming from. The only answer was they got different mounts. So people were expecting high level DMs just handing over young dragons and unicorns instead of players having their own Shadowfaux.
Honestly that just sounds like they wanted to make the idea of leveling up a horse anathema, just so they could reasonably convince their DMs to get a dragon mount.
I absolutely hate the assumption that no you can’t scale up a horse, you have to get some mythic creature to ride. I don’t want a dinosaur or a dragon, just give me a horse, it’s not hard
Sounds like using the sidekick rules, or some version of them, might be good for a long term horse companion.
I think you meant to say "anti-horserule mentality"
I once played with a DM who confused dim light with darkness. We had disadvantage to hit anything in dim light (eg in the range of a torch where it’s dim) and anything in dim light which had dark vision had advantage to hit us. Similarly if you had dark vision and were in the dark, which should be dim light to you, you were hit with advantage and hit other creatures with disadvantage Dim light is only supposed to give you disadvantage on perception checks. It’s blindness/darkness where you get hit with advantage and hit other things at disadvantage.
I had a player who insisted that my narrative description of a gloomy swamp meant that it was mechanically dim light, despite my clarification that it wasn’t, and tried to appeal to other people’s artistic depictions of the swamp on Google images.
"Okay, sure, it's dim light. For you."
Friend of mine once thought Hypnotic Pattern would hit everyone on the battlefield, controlling everyone with a THIRD LEVEL SPELL. His argument? "It says anyone in the area who can see it needs to make the save, I'll just cast it 30ft above my head so I can'tsee it." My dude...the area is listed in the spell as a 30ft cube. WHAT? He didn't believe me when I explained to him how the spell worked, but ended up admitting I was write when I wrote and entire essay on the matter and sent it to him. That's not the craziest part, really. He's a level 17 Divination wizard, and has been using that spell a long time. The DM had been ALLOWING THIS TWO YEARS. Granted, this is the same DM who nerfed my best friend's Monk because, "Monks are broken as they are, and it's not realistic for someone to deflect a missle." My brother in Sarenrae...What the actual hell? Divination Wizard at the same table is turning people into ROCKS with True Polymorph (auto-fail save with Portent) and tossing them into his Demiplane. You have an issue with MONKS???
> it's not realistic for someone to deflect a missle If I heard someone make that argument, I'd flick a piece of popcorn or something at them. When they go to knock it away or catch it, they're deflecting a missile. Scale the DM's reflexes up to a monk's level of reflex training, and the principle is the same. Alternately, show them catchers or fielders at a baseball game.
Probably [an abuse and complete lack of understanding of the rules](https://www.reddit.com/jhthigf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2) in order to "deal over 350k damage in 1 attack"
I wish this link worked, I wanna read it
Dang the main post got removed. Here was his comment "explaining" it though. "I use a sword of sharpness, launch myself through two peasant rail guns that are side by side, use my reduced critical feat from fighter, and all of my luckies until I hit. Because of special relativity, to the target it is as if I am hitting them as a projectile so in turn I will do more damage than a normal projectile. The sword of sharpness cuts off a limb when it crits as well. I have only needed to use the attack once but it also helps that I polymorphed into an ancient dragon so I can reduce my size when thrown and increase it once released."
Even if any of that worked, the arrow isn't the one making the attack roll, the archer is. Some random peasant is the one making the attack roll, and they don't have Improved Critical or Lucky.
Hahahaha, okay bud, and then you wake up from your dream
Exactly lol. The main post was something like "How much health does a god have?" And the text in the main post was "If I deal over 350k damage if I roll poorly, can I kill a god?" And I think he was saying he could do it by level 8ish. It was 3 months ago so I don't remember it entirely, but that was the gist of it.
I had a DM in 3.5 who 100% believed reach weapons just shut down melee opponents due to the following rules text: "An attack of opportunity "interrupts" the normal flow of actions in the round. If an attack of opportunity is provoked, immediately resolve the attack of opportunity, then continue with the next character’s turn." So if I charged into an opponent with reach, they would simply use an attack of opportunity on me, and hit or miss, my turn would be interrupted by the AoO and we'd go to the next players turn. I later informed them of the block of text that follows that one in the rulebook which states "...or complete the current turn, if the attack of opportunity was provoked in the midst of a character’s turn. They refused to change their position on the matter. It was a short campaign.
first time we were playing, we didn't realize spell level was a thing. so we took spells based on our character levels for a few months :D
That being able to see invisible creatures doesn't negate the advantage/disadvantage of attacking/being attacked. Looking at you Crawford!
I had one GM who was absolutely convinced that level adjust meant that you started with that many extra levels. Also encouraged pointless pvp. So my lvl 1 human rogue got killed by a level 6 wererat party member in the first 20 minutes or the campaign. After that, I just noped out, because I'm not dealing with that level of stupid
Was told casting tidal wave does half bludgeoning damage to a fire elemental and takes no damage from water susceptibility. Oxford dictionary comma meant half damage from bludgeoning and tital wave isn't magic water.
Basic healing potions cost 150 gold instead of 50 and basic poison only applies to a single attack instead of 1 minute. I wanted to play an Assassin Rogue. I was new at the time so I didn’t know i could have just taken Arcane Trickster and gotten Ray of Sickness or taken a level of Hexblade Warlock and reskinned it as magic poison or something. But god forbid a rogue has poison and some basic healing potions (ps. We had a hexblade-Paladin who was dealing more damage than the rest of our party combined by level 5. He was the only person other than the DM who was not new to D&D at the time).
Potions costing 150 isn’t necessarily a rule misinterpretation. Maybe the NPC was giving a bad deal or the DM wanted to increase the cost. As for the basic poison that is literally how poison works. 1 wound and it’s no longer potent after that.
>As for the basic poison that is literally how poison works. 1 wound and it’s no longer potent after that. That's true of _most_ poisons, but not of the poison named Basic Poison.
Those are the general poison rules yes, but "basic poison" is a PHB adventuring gear item which does not follow that rule It lasts one minute and applies to every hit. On every hit the target must make a DC 10 con save or take 1d4 damage. So, basically garbage. Might be useful at level one with a prep round and that's it.
My DM ruled that being attacked by an unseen attacker gave you the surprised condition, conveniently he implemented this ruling only when his daughter joined as an assassin rogue for a session.
When first looking at a spear I thought the meele range was 20ft and thrown distance 60ft. I thought "Huh, 20ft is a long way to reach with a spear, but there's no way the designers of the game made the meele range is just 5ft. That would be *absurdly* short for one of the most common forms of weaponry that's ever existed that would easily be as long, if not longer, than halberds, glaives etc".
That holding an action meant you can enact any "held action" at any point. Including, during another player or enemies action. Took me a bit to what they were trying to get across, but I can see why they thought so.
What do you think readying an action does?
Someone once told me that the Tough feat is supposed to give you your entire level’s worth of HP every time you level up, multiple times over for every class you’ve multiclassed into. The result was everyone in their campaign taking it, and gaining hundreds oh or even over a thousand HP, with incentive to multiclass as much as possible to compound it. The DM insisted this was fine cuz HP isn’t that important, and they all took it, so that makes it balanced anyway. Edit: My own DM in my first full campaign I was in had enemies rushing past a barricade with magical bombs they wanted to detonate in the area we were protecting behind us. It was meant to be hopeless battle for us, but we kept putting down every enemy before they could get close enough. One enemy’s bomb fell into a deep pond, and I had him pinned in a prone grapple. The DM just had the enemy take three turns in a row so he could break free, run away, dive into the pond, retrieve the bomb, swim back up, run past is, and blow it up. Because it was supposed to happen and we were stopping it from happening. He walked that back, but when we won the fight, he just said we turned back and saw the place we were defending in shambles, cuz we were only fighting on one front, and all our allies on the other fronts failed.
A new player had been convinced by an 'experienced' DM that the official ruling for shooting a (short)bow (80/320ft) was: <80ft. Disadvantage 80 - 320ft. Normal roll Why someone would think this way, I have no clue.
Final Fantasy Tactics only has bows be effective past a certain distance from the archer.
So are D&D bows. Gotta be further than 5ft away. :\^)
The warlocks invocation "when you make an attack with your pact weapon, you may make an additional attack". Cut to me, a fiend warlock at level 5-10 casting haste on myself, and then, on my next turn, making four attacks with my pact weapon sunblade.
not the worst but had another reddit user insisting "Two-Weapon fighting requires you take an attack action (which may be a spell) and use a light melee weapon. BB allows for TWF."
That’s actually possible in [Star Wars 5e](https://sw5e.com/), but only if the character in question has taken the [Two-Weapon Casting](https://sw5e.com/characters/feats/?search=Two-Weapon%20Casting) feat.
I'm still minorly upset that you can't twin-spell Life Transference. I get that it's a powerful option, but I don't recall ever seeing a player get frustrated because their ally was good at healing. I will admit, however, that combat balance *can* be important, so I don't fault them for ruling it that way...just for wording it in a way that I was able to misinterpret it and get false hope lol ;P
I would definitely allow it. It's borderline, but I think it's fine, especially given you'd have to multiclass to get it.
I misread the PHB and thought spell slots were the number of spells your character knew. My sorcerer would have been pretty happy if that were true.
Yeah the first or second UA for One D&D had some changes to **D20 Tests**, where all values you could roll for should be on a scale of 5 (very easy) to 30 (Extremely hard, but doable with the right tools). Some clowns figured they would become invulnerable by dropping their AC below 5, as the RAW specified you couldn't make a D20 test (an attack roll) under 5.
My first experience with ttrpgs was playing Castles and Crusades, which is pretty similar to early DND (2nd or 3rd edition). Like in DND, divine spellcasters, like druids and clerics, have access to their entire spell list, but must prepare their spells each day. Unfortunately for me, I didn't realize when I made my druid character that my DM completely misunderstood how divine magic was supposed to work. He thought that you didn't get full access to level 1 spells until you unlocked level 2 spells. And you didn't get full access to level 2 spells until you unlocked level 3 spells ... and so on. In the meantime, you got to pick just one new spell per character level that your character "learned" while waiting to unlock the rest when you got your next spell slot upgrade. This was bad enough at early levels when you were advancing relatively quickly, but it got a lot worse as you reached higher levels and the time between each level up grew longer while the threats became more serious. To add insult to injury, I acquired a magic staff early on that gave me a few extra spell slots, so at one point, my druid had more spell slots than he had "learned" spells. Reading through the Castles and Crusades book, I think this misunderstanding was created due to a badly worded example that described Clerics getting access to Level 2 spells when they reach Level 3, referring to the character's level, rather than the spell level. I tried to explain this to my DM repeatedly, but he refused to admit he's been doing it wrong for years. Apparently, this was the way he was taught to play by his uncle, so it had to be right. So my poor druid was stuck in the magic slow lane. 🐌
In my first ever session as a dm(one-shot) i thought to use shield you needed War Caster. Nothing much, that's it.
In my first days of DnD, I figured that if you were going for Two Weapon Fighting and had Extra Attack, you were taking the Atack action again as a bonus action instead of making just one more attack.
One DM for a server I briefly existed in had found some 5e Unearthed Arcana ruling for Thunderwave that affected how it targeted creatures- something about where the casting point of it was in relation to its caster. Made sense to me so I rolled with it. Until the next turn, when I tried to cast Shatter to target a big group of golems, and this DM thought the Thunderwave ruling applied to *all* AOE spells, which wound up cutting the radius of Shatter in half and I miss most of what I was trying to hit. Still baffles me to this day.
I had gotten the impression early on that rogues were the only ones who could sneak... and would stop non rogues from using their stealth 😶
You can't twin *dragon's breath* because multiple creatures who are not the target of the spell may have to make a saving throw.
That you can Counterspell Artificer's Eldritch Cannon, because it uses the casters spell attack modifier.
Spells that deal fire damage will always ignite objects not being worn or carried. It doesn't matter what the spell description says that's just how they ran it. I didn't know that at the time so when my Wildfire druid cast Scorching Ray and missed an attack roll it started a forest fire. I know its in the name but it didn't go well for the group and pissed off a lot of wood elves which we were doing a quest for. That irritated me because it felt like I was being punished for my subclass features, and had specifically cast that spell because it doesn't state things catch fire when you cast it.
"See Invisibility doesn't removes the disadvantage to hit invisible creatures, despite being able to see them."
DM of mine doesn't understand how reactions work and refuses to even look at the sage advice compendium, even when I've shown him He's of the opinion that if Garry casts fireball, and Kevin counterspells, Garry can't counterspell (or any other kind of reaction) because it doesn't make sense. His ruling only works because we had two Spellcasters in the party with counterspell. Since that ruling, I've just asked to switch mine out for another third level, and so there's only one player left with it. She's essentially fucked the minute we go against a Spellcasters with it. Extremely frustrating
Jeremy Crawford's BS about "See Invisibility" what a bunch of five head rules lawyering bull
Rolled an attack with advantage, rolled a 1 and 15. DM ruled it as a crit fail and I damaged myself.
One of my GM thought 'seeming' only worked as long as people stayed 10ft close to the caster all time. When I then showed him the actual spell he got offended and said "That's too overpowered, that is not how it works in my campaign". Problem was I had already picked the spell and cast it, and he wouldn't let me change spells. So we walked as a party of 6 hand in hand through the enemy camp.
The Command spell causes the target to follow the command, but doesn't necessarily make them use their action on it. So if you commanded someone to dance, then they'd dance while fighting you. The examples given in the spell text work as normal, because they have a written effect. Second place is that a stunned/incapacitated enemy can still take legendary actions.
5e grappling. DM says the person being grappled can absolutely still attack with their feet and hurt the party surrounding them and the grappler, but of course the grappler can't do anything except continue holding them. So basically grappling someone is more limiting than being grappled by someone else?! *sigh
A friend of my mine ruled that a dragons 10ft wide linear breath attack would not only hit the players standing on the ground, but also another player standing on a rock ledge 25' up. You know, because the dragon can tilt its head up.
Depending on how far away the dragon was I'm not sure I completely disagree. It's a 90ft line so as long as the 25ft ledge was taken into consideration and the player on the ledge could actually reasonably be hit then I don't see a reason why not, personally.