What Was I Saying...?

WARNING: Rant ahead.

When D&D fifth edition landed, it was such a breath of fresh air. 3.x and Pathfinder (first edition) had become so cumbersome with bonuses, status effects, corner cases, and who-knows-what, that I had reached the point of not being able to bear to run them. Even with reskinning, books full of source material, and so on, I got so sick of my Saturday nights being an extended math class that I switched to Savage Worlds and ran only that for a while… which had its own problems, but that’s for some other time. Point is, I ran The Lost Mine of Phandelver and instantly fell in love. It was D&D, but with rules that made sense and moved fast, and it was amazing.

But over the past several months, I find myself fighting with it a lot more than enjoying it, and it’s starting to grind at me, both as a player and as the DM.

You Can’t Make That Character In This Game

I am a HERO System child, and that will always be part of me. One result is that I come up with very fleshed-out character concepts and “kits,” strong ideas about who the character is and how they should work. For example, a character I recently wanted to build was a pistol-packing harengon ship’s engineer, just in case a Spelljammer campaign materialized in my future. Think a cross between Gadget Hackwrench and Tracer from Overwatch. Should be a fairly straightforward thing, right? Artillerist Artificer, and you’re good to go. Except Artillerist is a pet class. You can carry your little turret companion like a weapon if you want to, but it’s still basically a familiar doing its own thing. I also wanted this character to have a wicked kick, with those harengon legs—not something she’d be doing on the regular, more as a bit of character fluff and a potential back-up to fall on if she was pinned down for some reason. So Fighting Initiate could get that with the Unarmed Combat style… except a harengon doesn’t get access to a feat until 4th level, and has to give up one of their quite-probably-only ASIs to get it.

So I tried an Armorer with Thunder Gauntlets, reskinning a heavy crossbow as her paired pew-pew pistols (making one attack requiring two hands), or using the Custom Lineage option to build a kinda-sorta harengon who could get Fighting Initiate but lost the signature leap ability in the process, or Artificer with a couple of levels of Fighter… I tried all sorts of combos. Some of them kinda-sorta worked, but none of them were what I really wanted, or at least wouldn’t become what I really wanted until well into the campaign. Which points to the next problem.

D&D Is Secretly a Seven-Level Game

5E’s designers made it no secret that they really considered 3rd level to be where most campaigns should probably start, but that they felt compelled to include the “training wheels” levels of 1-2 for reasons of tradition and easing new players in. Which, meh, but I could live with that if the game didn’t start to come apart at 6th level and generally go off the rails completely by 9th or 10th. I’m not just talking about the famously-broken CR system that doesn’t work past 3rd, but just the sheer arms race between the PCs and the monsters. Once the 3rd- and 4th-level spells come out, no monster who doesn’t have maxed hit points is likely to survive more than one round; and if you scale up the monsters so they can last any length of time, they’re almost as likely to one-punch any party member who isn’t a barbarian. I’ve observed in multiple games now that starting around 7th level combat feels less like a tactical skirmish and more like rocket tag. Which is fun sometimes, but for me at least it gets old fast.

So the “good part” of the game starts at 3rd level, starts creaking at 6th, and rare is the campaign that goes above 10th. That’s effectively a 7-level game, even if there are 20 levels in the book. If you like unusual character combos, say a burglar who’s also a martial artist a la the image at the top of this page, you probably won’t get there until the campaign’s half over—by which time the barbarian’s reckless rage, the paladin’s smite-nova, etc. are all going to be way more effective than anything you can pull off anyway. (Let’s not even get into the fact that such a character would be extremely cool in the Tier-1 or Tier-2 worlds of mortal adventure, but completely in the wrong world for Tier-3+. Spider-Man can go to space, sure, but he doesn’t BELONG there.) Which leads to the next issue…

Anti-Fun Abilities You Can’t Not Use

It’s against my nature to ban character abilities; given the “You Can’t Make That Character” issue already mentioned, I want more options instead of fewer. However, in practice, there start to be some things that show up over and over again, because they’re too good not to use, and I would argue, actually make the game less fun for me as a player, and definitely make the game less fun for me as the DM. For instance…

• Stunning Strike. On paper, this seems like a fun little controller ability. Spend some of your class resource to make the enemy lose a turn, giving you advantage on hitting them on the next turn. Thematically it fits: has there been a martial arts movie fight where the hero didn’t ring an opponent’s bell, shove them through a pile of crates, or something else that took them out of the fight briefly? So it should be great. But what happens in practice? The monk spams stunning strike until the BBEG fails their saving through purely through the law of averages, and then the rest of the party surround-and-pounds, fight over one round. What cool things can the BBEG do? You’ll never know.


• Spirit Guardians. Who even let this into the game? The cleric gets an aura that auto-kills enemies within 15′ of them without any effort or risk on their part… and 3/4 of the monsters in the game have no ranged options? The first time someone cast this in my game, I thought I had to be reading it wrong, but nope, that’s how it works. Instead of being afraid of an angry mob, the cleric runs towards them.


• And More… Banishment ends entire fights with a single saving throw. Wild Shape gives you multiple hit point pools that you can just use and discard. With the right subclass and a single feat, a human barbarian could literally resist all damage of any kind at 3rd level. I used to think sneak attack was broken, until I saw a game get above 5th level, now I feel like rogues have kinda gotten the shaft.

“yOU JuSt Ne3D To bE crEATivE!”

Posting about any of these issues to just about any internet space will get you a bunch of Reply Guys telling you that they can be fixed through encounter design or somehow magically by “Just being creative!” So let me throw in a sidebar rant about that, while I’m ranting. I’m already the King of Reskinning; being a HERO System child teaches you that, as the entire system is literally nothing but reskinning. As for encounter design, does it really make sense that I should have to build all of my encounters around the fact that the paladin is going to go supernova on their smites on the first round, or the barbarian does 75 points of damage per turn unless they crit, or that the wizard will limit every creature to being able to move or attack but not both? What, pray tell, is the point of even having published adventures when I have to throw away all the written encounters and rebuild them from scratch because WotC foes are made of tissue paper? YES, D&D encounters work better if you have multiple foes rather than a single powerful monster, and YES it’s okay for the players to flex on the monsters sometimes, and YES I can just give every monster more hit points or have another wave come running around the corner, BUT these are not solutions to the systemic problems.

Sooo… Whatcha Gonna DO About It?

Honestly, I don’t know. I think that the core engine of 5E is fine, honestly, but it has too much “D&D Baggage” attached to it to really find a meaningful solution. You’d have to go through the whole system from top to bottom to pound out every proud nail, dry out every damp squib, and tune every sour note, at which point you’re basically playing a different system anyway. Pathfinder 2E seems tempting, with promises of robust 1st-level characters and repeated claims by various YouTube channels that it actually is and stays balanced for 20 levels, but I have my concerns.

Heck, HERO System still exists, even if it’s a giant wall-o-text mess these days, and so does Savage Worlds and any other number of alternate rules systems. But D&D is easily King of the Hill in terms of online/remote play support, with PF2E the only other one that even comes close. There are a few random people doing Foundry Mods or Roll20 plug-ins for games that aren’t D&D/PF2E, but they’re super-niche.

So… I don’t know. It might just be that I need a break.

Wow, has it really been August since I last posted here? Crazy. >.>

Anyway! We’re nearing the end of Tomb of Annihilation, so victory or defeat, we’ll soon be heading back to the characters from Storm King’s Thunder, all waiting patiently at 11th level for the story to roll back around to them. And, NGL, I’ve got cold feet. High level D&D and I have not had a smooth relationship over the years, in that kind of “our star signs don’t match” way that isn’t anybody’s fault but still gums things up.

Leaving out my philosophical/aesthetic problems wrapping my head around high level play, there’s also the fact that 5E’s rules just plain break. This was evidenced most dramatically at the end of Storm King’s Thunder when, after hearing about what a damp squib the fight against the campaign bigbad was, I buffed it like crazy and they still curbstomped her. This was an 11th level party going against a CR 23 monster, mind you, with big buffs on either side, yes, but at the end of the fight most of the support characters on either side were a wash.

It’s not so much the outcome of the fight that bugged me about it… I would have liked the baddie to last one more round, maybe? But she did get to do a few things. What bugged me was that this was a fight that, on paper, should have reduced the PCs to a thin yellow spray, and they knocked it out of the park. Good on them for knocking it out of the park, but that clearly means that I can’t trust the encounter building guidelines, period. This is a huge problem because, with so little high level content available, I’m gonna have to homebrew 85-90% of it, and I don’t have any tools to work with other than eyeballing everything and hoping for the best.

Just, ugh. :P I can do it, but the whole point of using The Popular Game™ is that I shouldn’t have to be building everything from scratch.

So earlier this week, I decided to give Pathfinder 2E a look. I keep hearing about how it has so much more robust math and so very many character options that we wouldn’t have to homebrew a new race for InkBlitz and SirFox every campaign, the rules would just cover it. When 5E came out I literally gave away almost all my Pathfinder 1E books because I was so burned out on the 3.x engine I knew I would never willingly run it again; when PF2E came out, I didn’t even give it a look, because I was quite comfy running my (at the time low-level) 5E game. By a weird quirk of synchronicity, I found a bunch of recent YouTube videos with titles like “Why Are So Many 5E DMs Switching to Pathfinder Lately?” which gave me a lot to chew on. By an even weirder quirk, Paizo just announced earlier this week that they are releasing a 5E conversion of one of their most popular PF2E adventure paths, which amused me.

So I dove into vids from prominent PF2E creators and I picked up a copy of the Pathfinder Beginner Box on Roll20 to give it a look. I built a PF2E adaptation of Shade-Of-the-Candle, and generally gave it as thorough a poke around as I could without starting a whole new trial campaign. These are the thoughts I had on the topic:

Running the Treadmill

5E and PF2E have fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings. Thanks to bounded accuracy, 5E is “static,” with the 10-30 DC range being pretty dependable across all levels. Even the advantage/disadvantage mechanic doesn’t change the range of numbers you can hit, just the probability that you’ll roll high. A completely cheesed-out high level character in 5E might make a check or attack roll with as much as +6 proficiency, +5 stat bonus, and a dizzying +3 gear/circumstance bonus, turning their average roll into a 25. But a skilled low-level character could also conceivably hit a 25 in something they’re good at! Since most creatures’ AC tops out around 20, the effect of this is that high level characters hit their target more often, but low level characters aren’t necessarily locked out of being effective at all.

PF2E, on the other hand, adds your level to every check with which you’re proficient—and to balance that, DCs and monster AC goes up by the same amount. As long as you only fight on-level stuff, this is a wash, but it means you will ROFLstomp anything just a few levels below you, or get ROFLstomped in return by anything just a few levels above you. This effect is magnified by the way PF2E handles critical successes and failures, and PF2E leans into that by having crits explode in effectiveness. High level creatures aren’t just hitting low level creatures more often, they’re pouring crit after crit into them. As a result, you get the MMO-style world that either quietly levels up around you based on your stats, or the challenges around you rapidly get trivialized as you level past them.

That’s something that used to bug me in 3.x/PF1, where it was less pronounced. In PF2E, you have to be all in on that design, or you won’t have a good time. Bring on the Level 15 stirges, baby!

Oh, and since it only effects things you’re proficient with, by the time you’re 5+ levels deep, the chances of succeeding a skill check you aren’t proficient with rapidly fades, leading characters to hyper-specialization in short order.

Razor’s-Edge Encounter Balance Cuts Both Ways

From all reports I could find, the encounter creation rules in PF2E have their rough spots but are mostly as accurate as described. And like D&D 4E, PF2E is balanced mostly around the encounter rather than the adventuring day. This makes story-based adventures (where there may only be one fight per day) work much better, as you don’t have a big imbalance between the casters/paladins/monks who can go nova, and the lowly “dependable martials” who can’t. On the other hand, it means that the only three encounter difficulties are “Trivial,” “Challenging,” and “OMG.” The best description I heard of it was “Every encounter in PF2E feels like a boss fight.”

As the DM, this can be super-freeing, because all you have to do is grab monsters that match the math and you can be confident you’ll get what you want out of the encounter. On the other hand, it can be super-limiting, because you can’t just toss whatever you feel like in there! You have to run the math for everything so you don’t accidentally put in the one owlbear too far that turns it from a good fight into a one-way trip to Boot Hill for your PCs. Where 5E is so loose as to be shapeless, PF2E is so tight that you run a regular risk of overtuning.

Swords and Spreadsheets

Pathfinder 2E is a game that is daunting to look at, period. Every character sheet or monster statblock is a sea of keywords that you have to either memorize or have quick reference for. Building your character requires choosing a Background, a Heritage, a Class, an Archetype, feats attached to all of those, and then any extra feats or proficiencies you still have left over at the end; then every time you level up, all of your proficient values change and you gain at least one new ability, whether that’s a class feature, a racial feat, a personal feat, etc. Running the game is an exercise in tracking “+2+1-4+2+2-2 = +1” calculations for everything you do, and because of the importance of critical success/failure, each one of those +1’s or -1’s is important. Now most of this calculation is just done up front (or when you level up), but if you have players with a short attention span—or you’re a DM who can’t hold more than three things in your head at once—there’s going to be a lot of “What was that modifier again? What does this condition do again? Wait, does insert spell name here apply?” going on, which is exactly the sort of thing that slows games and why 5E created the whole “advantage/disadvantage” system in the first place.

Basically, you’ve got to think about the mechanics a lot more often, and having a rule for EEEVERYTHING makes it a lot easier to “do it wrong.” The system gives you a solid framework to build custom creatures/items/character abilities on, but it’s like a giant erector set with a bunch of weird-looking little pieces. What do they all do? Why is this one at this weird angle? Why are there four different types of connectors??? I’m sure it works beautifully once you’ve got the hang of it, but from the outside it just makes my eyes swim.

My Fallacy Cost Sunk! (or, “Trading One Kind of System Pain For Another”)

Honestly, one reason I was considering PF2E was to bring back crunchy magic item rules for SirFox; 5E has worse-than-nothing systems on this topic and it’s caused us headaches in the past. But when I did a quick-and-dirty canvassing of opinions from group, he was the first one to argue against learning a new system so far into an established campaign. It surprised me, but other players said basically the same thing, and they’re not wrong. Jumping into Pathfinder at any level higher than 1 would probably be a disaster in terms of learning the system. But there’s also the fact that I’m just not convinced that it wouldn’t be just trading one set of problems for a different set.

I still have to come up with adventures that will work for these characters in this campaign. 5E is going to be mostly silent on this front, with me grabbing what third-party stuff I can find to use from the DM’s Guild, but mostly making it up as I go—with useless encounter building guidelines. Pathfinder has high-level content and great tools, but its adventures are as dense as the rule system they’re built for, and when I’ve run them in the past I usually end up throwing out large chunks and homebrewing the rest anyway. Even at higher levels, 5E is mostly-transparent at the table and fairly breezy in combat… the idea of going back to hour long fights does not appeal. O.o

So for the time being at least, I ended up deciding to stick with 5E. When we someday reach the end of the Storm King crew’s campaign, maybe I’ll look at running some PF2E just to see what it’s actually like… but I suspect by then we’ll either be at or near new editions for both. We’ll see.

-The Gneech

Pictured: Probably not challenging enough.

In terms of round-by-round, 5E is great. It doesn’t have the grind-grind-grind problem of 3.x/PF, nor the “everybody is a sorcerer” problem of 4E (which, I’m told, also gets ridiculously grindy in short order).

But structurally, in terms of encounter building and monster design (and how that ties in with rest and advancement), I feel like it still has problems.

The Resource Management Game Nobody Plays

The “15-minute workday” is still a thing in 5E. The game is balanced around the notion that every two encounters (or so) the characters will take a short rest, and that after their sixth encounter of the day they’ll take a long rest.

In order for that to work, most of the individual encounters need to not be that tough. The party uses a big spell in one, the fighter loses some hit points in the next, and so on, but they can soldier on through. Because no one encounter is likely to wreck the party, they can keep on going until they’re out of Adventure Fuel (i.e., hit points and spells), and then recharge with a long rest.

The problem there is that, narrative wise, this can get real boring. If the stakes are that low for almost every encounter, and you have limited game time, there is a strong desire to “skip to the encounter that actually matters.”

So there is a strong inclination to beef up individual encounters, so that each one feels more significant. Instead of six rooms with six orcs each, the party finds three rooms with twelve orcs each. (Of course, in a well-built dungeon, there’ll be more variety than that. But you get the idea.)

But! When confronted with tougher encounters, players inevitably go nuclear on them– the wizard opens every fight with a fireball, the fighter uses their action surges, etc.– and it makes perfect sense for them to do so. The players don’t know how tough the encounter is or isn’t, or what the GM might have up their sleeve. Better to blast the hell out of everything and be reasonably sure you got it all, than to get one-punched by something without ever getting a spell off.

And what do players do after they’ve gone nuclear? They want a long rest to recharge! If that means backing out of the entire dungeon and coming back the next day to take it one room at a time? That’s what they’ll do.

Fighters get the shaft in a situation like this– their strength relative to magic-users is they can keep fighting all day without expending resources. But if the wizard gets recharged every time, the endurance of martial classes is irrelevant. (This is why everyone was a sorcerer in 4E.) Action surges and stuff like that make fighters a little more bursty to compensate, and of course 5E rogues are OP no matter how you slice it, so it’s not as bad as it was in 3.x/PF, but it’s still a thing.

The NERF™ Monster Manual

My campaign currently has a very large party. Six PCs, plus 1-3 NPCs of varying power levels depending on the scenario. This utterly breaks the action economy as it is, but even moreso once Bounded Accuracy comes into play.

Far from making it so that “even goblins can stay viable threats,” with a party this size B.A. makes it so that “even dragons are never a viable threat.” ;P In my last session, the 5th level party went into a fight with three wights and six zombies, and didn’t break a sweat. They were a little annoyed at the way the zombies kept standing back up again… but it wasn’t scary, so much as a nuisance.

Dammit, I want wights to be scary. -.-

When you have an edition in which levels 1-2 are pretty much intended to be skipped, but 60% of the monsters are CR 3 or lower, you end up with things like this. When you then combine NERF™ monsters with beefed up encounters, you suddenly have 5th level parties facing beholders. Combat then becomes very, very swingy, a game of rocket tag in which the only roll that matters is “initiative.”

Not great for “heroic fantasy” style gameplay. Also not great when the players have six chances to roll higher initiative than the monsters. ;P (Savage Worlds, a game that deliberately has rocket tag combat, also makes you check initiative fresh at the beginning of each round to at least add a little more uncertainty to this.)

Encounter Inflation and XP

The other danger of beefed up encounters, using the default assumptions of XP and level advancement, is that characters get beefed up XP, which in turn makes them advance faster, and the whole thing just explodes geometrically.

This can be avoided by decoupling XP from monster CR (or at least minimizing it), which a lot of my favorite RPGs of the past did by default. The HERO System for instance gave a pretty flat “3 XP per session, +/- 1-2 points for dull/easy or awesome/tough sessions.” You could (and our group often did) go through whole sessions without anyone so much as throwing a punch– and as long as everyone had a good time, you didn’t feel like you’d been shafted in the XP department for it.

The most recent Unearthed Arcana column has an interesting take on this, proposing a “100 XP per level” model in which exploration, interaction, and combat all have 1-4 tiers of difficulty, and any given encounter would give (10 x tier) XP.

I think this is a neat idea, although the first thing I notice is that it flattens XP progression back out. 5E is famously designed so that you fast-forward through levels 1-2, slow down for 3-10, and then pick up a little from 11+. The XP for monsters might still need work tho– it basically boils down to “5 XP per normal monster, 2 XP per minion, 15 XP for something way out of your league.” In the case of my party vs. the not-terribly-scary wights, that would have been 22 base XP, halved for having more than 6 characters, or 11 XP. Was that encounter really worth 1/10 of a level?

The tiers for treasure and interactions are also sorta arbitrary. Tier 4 exploration (worth 40 XP) is the discovery/wresting from monsters a “location of cosmic importance,” for instance. If a campaign starts doing the whole plane-hopping thing later, you’ll be discovering cosmic locations all the time, won’t you?

But the key thing is, with this system, combat is no longer the benchmark for character growth. Like the original “1 GP = 1 XP” model, characters who like to talk, sneak, or otherwise do things besides fight all the things have an alternate progression track, and that makes for a more varied and potentially-interesting game.

So What Does It All Mean?

Based on all this, I think I would prefer:

• Beef up monsters a bit. When 1st level lasts a while, a CR 3 monster (like a wight) is scary longer. When the game starts at 3rd level and goes up from there, a CR 3 monster becomes the new baseline. By that reckoning, a lowly goblin should be at least CR 1, while a wight should be something like CR 5. Almost everything in the Monster Manual needs at least +10 hit points and +2 to their attack rolls. 😛


• Tweak rests. This post is hella long already, so I will have to save the “rest” issues for another day. Something that will allow for tougher individual encounters, without screwing over the fighter types and/or creating 15 minute workdays is a big challenge.


• Non-Combat XP is Best XP. A tier-based system in which each encounter (whether it is a puzzle, a roleplaying moment, a fight, a treasure looted, whatever) gains about the same XP makes for a much more interesting game. Is talking to the shop-owner as much of a learning experience as fighting for your life? Well… maybe not. But if it’s a great moment in the game, it should be more rewarding than just tossing a fireball at 2d6 orcs.

What do you think, players?

-The Gneech

Lachwen Shimmerlight (CR 2; 450 XP)

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Female humanoid (half-elf) sorcerer 6, chaotic good
AC 13*; hp 38 (6d6+12)
Speed 30 ft.

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STR 10 (+0), DEX 15 (+2), CON 14 (+2), INT 12 (+1), WIS 8 (-1), CHA 17 (+3)

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Feats Elemental Adept (Lightning)
Saving Throws Con +6, Cha +7*
Damage Resistances Lightning, Thunder
Skills Arcana +4, Athletics +3, Insight +2, Intimidation +6, Perception +2, Performance +6
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 12
Languages Common, Draconic, Elvish, Primordial

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Elemental Adept. Spells Lachwen casts ignore resistance to lightning damage. In addition, when she rolls lightning damage for one of her spells, she can treat a roll of 1 on a damage die as a 2.
Font of Magic. Lachwen can draw upon a wellspring of power, giving her 6 sorcery points which may be used to create spell slots or fuel her metamagic abilities.
Heart of the Storm. Lachwen is resistant to lightning and thunder damage.
Metamagic. Lachwen knows the Careful Spell and Distant Spell metamagic abilities.

Spellcasting. Lachwen is a 6th-level spellcaster. Her spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 14, +6 to hit with spell attacks). Lachwen knows the following spells:
Cantrips (at-will): dancing lights, fire bolt, lightning lure, prestidigitation, shocking grasp
1st level (4 slots): thunderwave, witch bolt
2nd level (3 slots): gust of wind, hold person, shatter
3rd level (3 slots): fireball, lightning bolt

Storm Guide. Lachwen may subtly control the weather around her.

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Actions
Dagger +1. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft. or range 20 ft./60 ft., one target. Hit: 1d4+3 piercing damage.

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Bonus Actions
Tempestuous Magic. Immediately before or after Lachwen casts a spell on her turn, she may use a bonus action to fly 10' without provoking attacks of opportunity.
*Ring of Protection

The Ones Still Left Behind

Orbis Leonis

sirfox

The Empty Spaces Between...

Obsidian
Medium humanoid (drow) bard 5, neutral

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Proficiency Bonus +3
Armor Class 15 (bracers of defense)
Hit Points 33 (5d8+5)
Speed 30'

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STR 8/-1, DEX 14/+2, CON 12/+1, INT 17/+3, WIS 10/+0, CHA 17/+3
Saving Throws Dexterity +5, Charisma +6
Skills Acrobatics +5, Arcana +6, Deception +6, Insight +3, Intimidation +6, Investigation +6, Perception +3, Performance +9, Persuasion +9; +1 to all ability checks that do not already include her proficiency bonus
Proficiencies light armor, rapier, shortsword, hand crossbow, whip, jeweler's tools, dulcimer, flute, viol
Senses darkvision 120'
Languages Common, Elvish, Undercommon
Challenge (don't have DMG guidelines yet; best guess CR 3, 700 XP)

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Background Guild Artisan
Personality Traits "Your appearance is everything– to be capable is expected, but to be capable and look good while you're doing it, takes true talent. While no longer among the drow aristocracy I was raised in, I still tend to view others around me as either underlings, rivals... or customers."
Ideals "Community. Polite society has its hazards, ranging from a knife in the back to poison at the table, but it is still far more comfortable and less dangerous than wrestling owlbears to put food on the table."
Bond "My art is all that truly matters, whether it's the beautiful jewelry I craft, or the beautiful music I make. Everything else, from tromping through squalid dungeons to sleeping in the wilderness with a tree root in my back, is in support of this."
Flaw "I am arrogant. I know this. And impatient. I know this too. But I know what I want– and I shall have it."

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Fey Ancestry Obsidian has advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put her to sleep.
Trance Obsidian doesn't need to sleep. Instead she meditates deeply for 4 hours a day, gaining the same benefit a human does from 8 hours of sleep.
Sunlight Sensivity Obsidian has disadvantage on attack rolls and Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight when she or the target are in direct sunlight.
Innate Spellcasting Obsidian can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components:

• At will: dancing lights


• 1/day each: darkness, faerie fire (save DC 14)

Guild Membership Obsidian is a member of the Artisans Guild in Khojar, gaining the benefits of guild membership, as described in the Players Handbook.
Spellcasting Obsidian is a 5th-level spellcaster that uses Charisma as her spellcasting ability (spell save DC 14; +6 to hit with spell attacks). Obsidian can also cast any spell she knows as a ritual if that spell has the ritual tag. Obsidian knows the following spells from the bard spell list:

• Cantrips (at will): mage hand, prestidigitation, vicious mockery


• 1st level (4* slots): cure wounds, detect magic, dissonant whispers, thunderwave


• 2nd level (3 slots): hold person, see invisibility, shatter


• 3rd level (2 slots): dispel magic

*+1 slot with pearl of power.
Bardic Inspiration (d8) Obsidian can use a bonus action on her turn to choose one creature other than herself within 60' who can hear her. That creature gains one Bardic Inspiration die, a d8. Once within the next 10 minutes, the creature can roll the die and add the number to one ability check, attack roll, or saving throw it makes. A creature can only have one Bardic Inspiration die at a time. Obsidian can use this ability 3 times per day, and regains any expended uses when she finishes a short or long rest. (Improved by Font of Inspiration.)
Expertise Obsidian adds double her proficiency bonus to Performance and Persuasion checks.
Jack of All Trades Obsidian may add half her proficiency bonus (rounded down), to any ability check that doesn't already include her proficiency bonus.
Mistress of the Lash Obsidian has studied the whip techniques of drow nobility. As an attack action, she may use a whip to attempt to trip a creature of up to one size larger than she is if the creature is within the range of the whip. This uses the same mechanics as Shoving a Creature, except that Obsidian uses her whip attack roll in place of the Strength (Athletics) check, and it can only be used to knock the target prone. She can also use a whip to attempt to disarm a foe, by making a melee attack roll with the whip, opposed by the Dexterity save of the creature she's attempting to disarm. If she is successful, the target drops a weapon or small object they are holding in one hand. Using the whip in either of these ways does not inflict any hit point damage.
Song of Rest Obsidian may use soothing music or oration to revitalize her allies during a short rest. If she or any friendly creatures who can hear her regain hit points at the end of a short rest, each of them regain an extra 1d6 hit points.

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ACTIONS
Whip +5, 1d4+2 slashing, reach, finesse
Hand Crossbow +5, range 30/120, 1d6+2 piercing, ammunition, light, loading
Rapier +5, 1d8+2 piercing, finesse

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REACTIONS
College of Lore: Cutting Words Obsidian can use her wit to distract, confuse, and otherwise sap the confidence and competence of others. When a creature that she can see within 60' makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a damage roll, she can use her reaction to expend one of her uses of Bardic Inspiration, rolling the Bardic Inspiration die and subtracting it from the creature's roll. The creature is immune if it can't hear her or it's immune to being charmed.

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Gear weapons, bracers of defense, pearl of power, a small collection of scrolls and potions

jamesbarrett

sirfox