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[Iduno]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Conjuration as a barred school? Even before teleportation, it had all of the good cloud attack spells (better versions of fireball), summons, and spells for tactical combat. I mean, grease is great at level 1, even if it isn't flammable anymore.

[Rolan7]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Conjuration as a barred school? Even before teleportation, it had all of the good cloud attack spells (better versions of fireball), summons, and spells for tactical combat. I mean, grease is great at level 1, even if it isn't flammable anymore.

(image fixed)
Yeah it's an odd pick.  I heard it was specifically to keep V from having teleport, a spell which generally makes travel unnecessary in 3.5, as pointed out in that comic.  But there's a lot of Divination that could also disrupt the narrative if V chose to use it more.

I guess that actually comes up a few times, with epic magic like Xykon's warding keeping the suspense alive.

[Iduno]

Yeah it's an odd pick.  I heard it was specifically to keep V from having teleport, a spell which generally makes travel unnecessary in 3.5, as pointed out in that comic.  But there's a lot of Divination that could also disrupt the narrative if V chose to use it more.

I guess that actually comes up a few times, with epic magic like Xykon's warding keeping the suspense alive.

Yeah, Divination's usefulness varies wildly depending on how it gets used and how effective the GM allows it to be. It is half of scry-and-die for a reason, though.

Enchantment allows you to control an enemy, which is one better than removing a single enemy. Evocation has half of the attack spells, which are okay if you somehow get put up against enemies who are immune to all of the other ways to remove them from combat. Illusion is amazing if you're creative, unless the GM decides everyone sees through illusions all of the time. Necromancy is somewhat similar to conjuration with healing, undead, and some combat uses. Transmutation has the buffs and debuffs, plus the real BS skills-ignoring spells like knock and levitate. And then it also has polymorph, and had teleportation.

Outside of divination and illusion, which are very GM-dependent, evocation would probably be the easiest to do without, with necromancy a close second?

[Kagus]

Outside of divination and illusion, which are very GM-dependent, evocation would probably be the easiest to do without, with necromancy a close second?

B-but but, Fireball!

Also really depends on version, because there were some really useful/powerful utility spells snuck into both Evocation and Necromancy at various points.


And oh hey... Tasha's new feats open up whole new worlds of stupidity. Take Fighting Initiate: Unarmed Combat on anyone to make them surprisingly fisty. Finally you can make that Punchlock you've always dreamed of, taking Investment of the Chain Master so you can tag-team a grappled opponent. And if you're a Hexblade, I guess the curse gives you +proficiency to the free 1d4 bludgeoning damage per turn as well? Hell of a chokehold you got yourself there, bud.

(Note: This is specifically for the fun/funny worlds of stupidity. Taking Blindsight or Devil's Sight on any character is of course probably a lot more "useful" than getting one step closer to Muscle Wizard)

[Kadzar]

Unarmed Combat is whatever. It's a thing you can take if you want, and it's not like most fighting styles are that great anyway.

The really stupid thing is taking Superior Technique with the Fighting Initiate Feat, because it only gives you one maneuver and nothing else, whereas if you took Martial Adept you could have gotten two.

[Kagus]

Unarmed Combat is whatever. It's a thing you can take if you want, and it's not like most fighting styles are that great anyway.

The really stupid thing is taking Superior Technique with the Fighting Initiate Feat, because it only gives you one maneuver and nothing else, whereas if you took Martial Adept you could have gotten two.

Or picking Metamagic Adept and opting for Heightened Spell (which you can never use unless you take levels of Sorcerer) and Empowered Spell if you're not a CHA caster.

[Kagus]

So I've been hanging out around the highly entertaining Goblin.bet arena, and been absent-mindedly thinking about D&D combat mechanics as a result.

Particularly, the idea that any amount of advantage cancels out any amount of disadvantage strikes me as... Well, it can lead to some odd situations. Like, if you're using the full range of a longbow and don't have Sharpshooter, you'll be firing at disadvantage since it's long range... But if the target doesn't see you (which is reasonably easy to accomplish at 300' away), then you get advantage on the attack. These two cancel each other out, and you fire normally.

And then you can close your eyes, and still have the same odds of hitting the target because Blinded can't provide any more disadvantage on the attack roll.


Is this RAW? Pretty much, yeah. Is the DM gonna let you get away with it? Probably not. Maybe.

[Cthulhu]

If you were doing something like that I'd probably rule that you can only hit on a natural 20 or something unless you're at the point that we're basically playing exalted, power-level-wise.

And I would be suspicious of you for a very long time for trying to do goofy RAW shit in my game.

[Mephisto]

You remember when WotC banned a content creator for having an OnlyFans while making Satine Phoenix one of the faces of the game?

Enjoy the latest official D&D Actual Play featuring Arieola Borealis, the boobie muppet.

[MrRoboto75]

At this time of day, at this time of year, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your twitter?

[Iduno]

So I've been hanging out around the highly entertaining Goblin.bet arena, and been absent-mindedly thinking about D&D combat mechanics as a result.

Particularly, the idea that any amount of advantage cancels out any amount of disadvantage strikes me as... Well, it can lead to some odd situations. Like, if you're using the full range of a longbow and don't have Sharpshooter, you'll be firing at disadvantage since it's long range... But if the target doesn't see you (which is reasonably easy to accomplish at 300' away), then you get advantage on the attack. These two cancel each other out, and you fire normally.

And then you can close your eyes, and still have the same odds of hitting the target because Blinded can't provide any more disadvantage on the attack roll.


Is this RAW? Pretty much, yeah. Is the DM gonna let you get away with it? Probably not. Maybe.

Yeah, the rules are meant to sort of make sense and cover some situations, but even they don't really have guidelines for when the rules work or don't. Weirdly, it's a magical world, but they're incredibly resistant to just saying "yeah, it works that way because magic" and not having to worry about what is or is not realistic. I'd respect it a lot more if they'd give one set of rules, explore what that means for the game (like you did here), and either decide the rules need something else or just say "yep, you got elf eyes/a magic bow/your family's black arrow/are just that good, now let's roll and see if you can land the shot." Much better than "well, sometimes the rules, but also sometimes not the rules?".

[scriver]

So I've been hanging out around the highly entertaining Goblin.bet arena, and been absent-mindedly thinking about D&D combat mechanics as a result.

Particularly, the idea that any amount of advantage cancels out any amount of disadvantage strikes me as... Well, it can lead to some odd situations. Like, if you're using the full range of a longbow and don't have Sharpshooter, you'll be firing at disadvantage since it's long range... But if the target doesn't see you (which is reasonably easy to accomplish at 300' away), then you get advantage on the attack. These two cancel each other out, and you fire normally.

And then you can close your eyes, and still have the same odds of hitting the target because Blinded can't provide any more disadvantage on the attack roll.


Is this RAW? Pretty much, yeah. Is the DM gonna let you get away with it? Probably not. Maybe.

Yeah, the rules are meant to sort of make sense and cover some situations, but even they don't really have guidelines for when the rules work or don't. Weirdly, it's a magical world, but they're incredibly resistant to just saying "yeah, it works that way because magic" and not having to worry about what is or is not realistic. I'd respect it a lot more if they'd give one set of rules, explore what that means for the game (like you did here), and either decide the rules need something else or just say "yep, you got elf eyes/a magic bow/your family's black arrow/are just that good, now let's roll and see if you can land the shot." Much better than "well, sometimes the rules, but also sometimes not the rules?".

Weirdly? Thankfully. That's literally the worst excuse. For anything.

[Kagus]

Similarly, if I'm blurred, there's absolutely no reason for me to try and poison my enemy because it won't do diddly with the rolls. He already can't accurately determine my position, so moving slowly/sluggishly can't make it any worse.

And on the flip side, a barbarian fighting an invisible opponent can just go Reckless the whole time. Invis dude already has advantage against the barb, barb loses absolutely nothing by going reckless and neutralizing their disadvantage on attacks against the unseen opponent.

That last one can at least be reasoned out... He's going full offensive, which would presumably put the invisible opponent slightly more on their heels and they'd be less capable of capitalizing on the barbarian's lack of vision. But a lot of advantage/disadvantage stacking (or lack thereof) really just doesn't make much sense.

[Persus13]

Yeah, its one of the interesting consequences of gamifying reality. D&D's goal isn't to be a life simulator, its goal is to be close enough to one while still being a game. So you get trade-offs like this.

One of the elegant things about advantage/disadvantage is its a fairly simple system that gets rid of a lot of bookkeeping around tracking modifiers. Now a lot of that bookkeeping was there to simulate real world things like targets being harder to hit when you can't see. And advantage/disadvantage still does that, but it does it in a way that's easy to remember and easy to track. So of course when you run into cases where a lot of things use the advantage/disadvantage system, things might get weird, but it still works in a way where you don't need to calculate 50 different modifiers in order to do something cool. Now, of course, if you like calculating those modifiers, there's nothing wrong with that, but it does take quite a bit of time at the table when you could be having fun describing your awesome shot at the dragon from 300 feet away.

I actually was in a game with a similar situation recently to your initial example of firing at long range and the reaction at the table wasn't "this is unrealistic that the blizzard and the long range can be cancelled out by hiding" but "I'd like to hit the dragon but I have disadvantage. What are things I can do to solve this problem and is it worth doing those instead of shooting at disadvantage". Because the trade-off worked for my table, but I can totally understand if it doesn't work for yours. The one area I don't like stacking advantage/disadvantage is the variant flanking rules. If I used flanking in my games, I'd probably use a flat bonus.

[Egan_BW]

Since DnD 5e seems to be the main accepted game to get people into roleplaying games (even though there are prolly better options, it's juts most popular), I do prefer there to be the advantage/disadvantage system rather than some big list of roll modifiers to count up. It's a simple and effective roll, and you're generally not going to see multiple advantages/disadvantages on the same roll in normal play.