5e announced!

[alhoon]

Madness is in the game!:

http://media.wizards.com/2014/downloads ... _257_8.pdf
The last 6 pages are about madness.

It's also very useful... since the preview is about poison. I'm counting down the days!
Some nice diseases there too. I like how there are different methods of recovery from diseases.
But Cackle fever spreads too easily IMO, although I like how it spreads madness now. The previous cackle fever was a little light.

[Le Noir Faineant]

Wasn't Nikosandros a child of the mists, as well? Thinking of old Valakian bookstores here...

[alhoon]

His name is Greek and he studies in Roma. My guess is he's Greek.

[alhoon]

Anyone has the DMG from those stores that are buddies with WotC?

And anyone knows when the PDFs will be updated? Today? In a couple of days or 9th December?

[Jester of the FoS]

Anyone has the DMG from those stores that are buddies with WotC?

And anyone knows when the PDFs will be updated? Today? In a couple of days or 9th December?

Sadly not yet.
A metric f-tonne of snow hit my town, delaying my ability to reach said store, but also said store's ability to get books on time.

[alhoon]

Please, once you have it give us a review.

The DMG IMO is where the shovel comes to the push. PHB was good, MM was kinda-good IMO but it was a very easy book to get right.
DMG is the hard part. DMG is where we will learn if there will be "modularity" or modularity.
It's important to know if the DMG is a glorified magic-item catalog that glosses rudimentary over the issues they mentioned in the index or they are covered adequately.

From what I've seen so far, the poisons were very good and deep. The few diseases felt better than in any edition.
On the other hand, the stronghold building was very disappointing with a short price list that was less than 1/5th of the length of carousing. The firearms and explosives were only given a basic outlook that can only form a basis, but they form a solid basis (the stronghold building rules are as if they're not there).

[Jester of the FoS]

[alhoon]

OK, I didn't read a lot of what you posted. Just checked that "honor checks" are something that I need to read carefully with a 50 Euro book in my hand and that Ravenloft is in with vagueness enough to make what you want with it.

Isolated domains? Sounds good but the wording doesn't exclude the possibility that all those demiplanes are bunched together in the core and in different corners of the Shadowfell there's the clusters and islands.

And the madness tables need... trimming up IMO. Too big and too drastic. "I found that I really like to kill people" ? Meh, that's what Talons are cursed with.
I am pleased by what I saw. I didn't expect so much. If only they had better rules for strongholds...


The horror rules: Seem solid enough to me. All we need to do as a fraternity IMO Jester is put up a table of example DCs to help the budding DM.

[TheSalemlord]

Jester, can we have a look at the modern weapons please?

[alhoon]

They were in one of the excerpts
http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.ph ... s-FIREARMS!

[TheSalemlord]

They were in one of the excerpts
http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.ph ... s-FIREARMS!

Thank you!

[IgnatiusJReilly]

I hope this is not the be all end all of Perkin's statement "you'll see more Ravenloft content soon". Then again, the domains are still in the Shadowfell, which I've yet to wrap my head around. So, maybe they're not going to do me any favors regardless.

[alhoon]

Ehh... to be sincere I didn't expect as much. We got horror and fear saves and something akin to madness saves.

You don't like the Domains of Dread in the Shadowfell? Put them somewhere else. No biggie.
Also, the domains of dread are not in shadowfell; they're in demiplanes that connect to the shadowfell from what I read. You can have them connect to any place you want and you'll still be within this blurb.
And you don't have to be BTW. Just saying.

[alhoon]

MY REVIEW OF THE DMG:
General: This book is comprised of tables and rules, quite compact. Solid, but not an easy read. Yes it's modular.
I have to admit that unlike the majority that loved it... it was a let down for me. Not what I expected. Not saying it's a bad book or bad DMG. Far from it! But... the price was steep for what would for me be mostly a treasure and magic item index. The rest I need more or less to make myself based on the info in the book. I already reverse-engineered the monster mechanics and updated my algorithm that calculates XP.
I really don't expect to use the DMG often. For me it was a waste of money. I could actually do without buying it, just by borrowing it from a friend and reading it once*. More or less? It gave me the "teaser" vibe. It had a feeling of "We plan to do this with planes and this with downtime. Expect the accessories"
*Treasure tables aside. Can't memorize those. But aside of coins I have to omit the majority of the magic items from the tables anyway.

It's not a bad book, it's just an expensive book considering that I'll rarely use it except to roll for treasure and it feels too... thin. I expected more bang for my buck than a "consider adding horror by choosing DCs and effects as appropriate" and "It takes 20 days, 500gp in materials and you have to know the recipe to make an uncommon item. Adjust as you like"


More precise:
In some cases, the book gives just a few, not enough in my opinion, examples and moves to different mechanics.
Diseases is such an example; just 3 diseases? We could use 5.
Fear and horror are other examples that could use more space. "Set the DC and then choose an effect from the madness tables" is what we get for horror.
Meh. 3-4 lines of examples would go a long way here. Something like "Your mother suddenly turns to werewolf during dinner and tries to kill you has a DC of ??? "
Traps could also use some expansion.

The madness tables let me "meh". I need to make my own madness tables.

Monster creation: While I appreciate and downright applaud the often mentioned "these are guidelines, you need to playtest", they don't give enough info to go around.
OK, resistance to slashing and piercing and bludgeoning at CR 2 is indeed effectively x2 hp. What about resistance to fire? Yes I know it depends on my group. But I could use a "generally adjust by x0.25 for every party member you expect to have problems" or something
Also some of the modifiers are kinda weird. A monster with save bonus on intelligence, charisma and strength is NOT as resistant as a monster with bonuses on wisdom, dex and con.
There's little help to account for spells too. OK for damage. What about hold person spells?

The running a business downtime activity was poorly and hastily done IMO. Everything seems to make the same profit if you roll above 40. Generally, downtime activities are too generic without information on how to alter for circumstances. You have to do the work yourself based on thin guidelines.
There's absolutely no guide how much money you earn from your lands; just a couple of notes on how much it costs and how cool it is to give it to players so they could collect taxes (no mention how much taxes).

Mapping from chapter 1:
Province scale, I don't like the urbanization; a town for just 8-12 villages and hamlets? More like a town for every 25-30 villages. And that still would be a population of just 8000-10000 people.
A hex in province scale is about 0.87 sq miles. With a historical density (without the use of magic) of 50-100 people/square mile those people should fill 15x10 hexes, not a map page.
The suggested "25-30 miles from the home base" gives something like 60x50 miles or a population density of 3/sq mile which is extremely low for medieval settings. Even the Baltic states at the early medieval age had bigger population density

Pet peeve: Artillery is laughably fast to load. 2 actions to load a mangonel? 1 action to load a cannon?

[Sorti]

BTW, the DMG (pag. 141) specifies that a rogue cannot use its bonus action to activate a magic item that requires an action. Which means you can only do stuff like pull levers, I guess. Not that useful.