Agreed, Laserllama did most of 5e’s classes a kindness. I prefer those to the PHB content.
Vumans get a feat, which is arguably one of the strongest abilities. Base humans are notoriously weak though.
I think they’re both winners.
Fuck, ain’t that the truth?
‘Normal D&D character’ is an oxymoron.
I’ve heard “because I like the sound of dice hitting the table.”
That’s because you have more agency in D&D than you do in real life.
Can’t long rest more than once per 24 hours.
Per Gygax himself:
“Adding a d% roll to an 18 Strength roll is hardly complicated. It was done because Strength was the only stat that needed to be increased in steps by the d% mechanic so as to improve fighters to hit and damage chances. So that was used because I favor interesting play over any imagined elegance, that being quite unlikely in an RPG in my view. RPGs are games, not art, and I don’t give myself airs.” “Can you imaging the increases of stats going into the 20s needed in order to get the same result as 18/00? The human norm bell curve of 3-18 down the tubes in a jiffy. Not elegant at all, and simply foolish ;-)”
Disclaimer, his views don’t reflect my own.
Reverse necromancer
So like, a murderer?
My biggest gripe with 5e is that T3/T4 play is effectively borked by the proficiency bonus scaling. Saving throws are impossible to make, AC is pointless, and martials get very little, if anything, that can compare to 6th+ spells. D&Done doesn’t appear to fix any of those issues.
The issue with this kind of thing is almost never the actual challenge or moral dilemma, wherever and however it may spring up - it’s usually about trying to narratively ‘pants’ a character with a poorly contrived But Thou Must or Sophie’s Choice, and the most generous interpretation of that action is that the GM feels that the suffering of a PC will help tell a good story. I find more often that these scenarios pop up in Humiliation Conga campaigns, where the GM just gets a kick out of creating worlds and encounters that primarily serve to inflict pain and misery on the PCs, and sometimes even the players themselves. And that’s not to say that those kinds of stories and settings can’t work or be enjoyable (Paranoia and the character-focused 40K games like Rogue Trader come to mind) but it has to be the kind of story that everyone at the table wants to tell.
Well that’s a given in most games, unless you’re going to lengths to depict your character as particularly homely.
In D&D I can live out my fantasies of having enough agency in my life to do something about the end of the world brought about by megalomaniacal bastards, and having positive net worth.
I mean, it does also illustrate how the empire’s strength lies in numbers and resources, and not in superior skill. There’s some evidence that stormtrooper accuracy is a lot better than popular media gives credit for (e.g. “these blast points are far too accurate for sand-people,”) and the only reason stormtroopers miss as much as they do in the movies is because they are under Vader’s orders not to injure Luke and Leia, which may or may not be true, but the battle on endor shows how susceptible the armor is to guerilla warfare that does, in fact, utilize those lower-tech weapons. I’m sure if the empire cared enough about the efficacy of the armor, they could develop a suit that incorporated shield technology and win battles with a fraction of the troops they use, but again, the suit’s primary function is to mark these shock troops as the face of an insurmountably vast empire. I would not be surprised if the poor defensive qualities of the armor are intentional, to foster a strategic message to the empire’s enemies that says “we don’t care how many you kill, there will always be more.”
What the fuck was the point of this thing?
It’s just a two hour long exposé into misery.
I mean, yeah.
Only for attack rolls. Ability checks and saves do not crit fail (or succeed) and reliable talent treats rolls for ability checks that add proficiency bonus as 10 at the lowest regardless, so even if a 1 were a crit fail, it wouldn’t matter.