I'm DMing one DnD 5e campaign for two friends and a player in another. The campaign where i'm a player in has been a little rocky (which i don't care about that much because i get to play) and the one i'm DMing has been a major success, my players are invested in the world and the story and they absolutely love it.
My campaign even survived an 8 month break which is usually a death sentence for a campaign in the group i'm in.
Could be a strong setting yeah, and the imagery and what have you. It could also be something mechanical too; Shadowrun's 'essence' stat lowering as you get cyberware is a mechanic that gives some thematic vibes.
I'm not talking about multiclass, just the normal classes. An Ancestral Guardian barbarian halves the CR of any monster he hits. This actually reminds of a crazy thing that happened in a game I was playing years ago:
DM: soooo, the Dragon (CR over 20) critically hits the poor Rogue and deals 80 piercing damage, reducing her to 0 h- Barbarian: No, he has disadvantage on all attacks that don't target me, roll again
DM: Ok, the Dragon just hits her then, dealing 40 piercing damage, still reducing the Rogue to 0-
Barbarian: No, when the Dragon deals damage to a creature other than me, that creature gains resistance to all damage, meaning she only takes 20 damage.
DM: FINE! but it's still enough to bring her to 0 hp! Rogue it's your turn, roll your death sa-
Barbarian: Wait, I use my reaction to reduce the damage dealt by 4d6... 21! ok, the Rogue takes 0 damage and the Dragon takes 21 force damage.
DM: . . .
I'm not talking about multiclass, just the normal classes. An Ancestral Guardian barbarian halves the CR of any monster he hits. This actually reminds of a crazy thing that happened in a game I was playing years ago:
DM: soooo, the Dragon (CR over 20) critically hits the poor Rogue and deals 80 piercing damage, reducing her to 0 h- Barbarian: No, he has disadvantage on all attacks that don't target me, roll again
DM: Ok, the Dragon just hits her then, dealing 40 piercing damage, still reducing the Rogue to 0-
Barbarian: No, when the Dragon deals damage to a creature other than me, that creature gains resistance to all damage, meaning she only takes 20 damage.
DM: FINE! but it's still enough to bring her to 0 hp! Rogue it's your turn, roll your death sa-
Barbarian: Wait, I use my reaction to reduce the damage dealt by 4d6... 21! ok, the Rogue takes 0 damage and the Dragon takes 21 force damage.
DM: . . .
Just give the dragon minions to make the fight more difficult, Ancertal Protection affects only the first creature the barbarian hits and it can rage only so many times. Or just exhaust their resources before a big fight with a gauntlet of enemies to make a solo boss more intense.
I'm not talking about multiclass, just the normal classes. An Ancestral Guardian barbarian halves the CR of any monster he hits. This actually reminds of a crazy thing that happened in a game I was playing years ago:
DM: soooo, the Dragon (CR over 20) critically hits the poor Rogue and deals 80 piercing damage, reducing her to 0 h- Barbarian: No, he has disadvantage on all attacks that don't target me, roll again
DM: Ok, the Dragon just hits her then, dealing 40 piercing damage, still reducing the Rogue to 0-
Barbarian: No, when the Dragon deals damage to a creature other than me, that creature gains resistance to all damage, meaning she only takes 20 damage.
DM: FINE! but it's still enough to bring her to 0 hp! Rogue it's your turn, roll your death sa-
Barbarian: Wait, I use my reaction to reduce the damage dealt by 4d6... 21! ok, the Rogue takes 0 damage and the Dragon takes 21 force damage.
DM: . . .
Something about that series of abilities seems fishy to me on the players end, I think they may have been pulling one over on you with something they couldn't have; I could be wrong, it's been awhile since I've played 5e and I've never had to deal with an ancestor guardian barb. The game did get absolutely silly though with the expanded subclasses and shit. It started feeling like an action-RPG video game or something.
And what @AxeHammer said; the CR system of 5e needs a little bit of finagling from the GMs side. It doesn't account for the action economy at all, which is 90% of how to balance an encounter. A dragon may be big and be above the parties CR, but it's only putting out 2 actions a turn as opposed to the parties 3 or 4 characters worth.
Something about that series of abilities seems fishy to me on the players end, I think they may have been pulling one over on you with something they couldn't have
That actually is something that an ancestral guardian barbarian could reasonably do in 5e if they're at least level 14. The ancestral protectors feature does make it so that while you're raging, whatever the first creature you hit with an attack on your turn was would have disadvantage on attack rolls against targets that aren't you, and gives whatever creature that does get hit resistance specifically to the damage dealt by that attack. The spirit shield ability allows you to, as a reaction, reduce the damage any creature you can see within 30 feet of you takes by 2d6, 3d6 at level 10, and 4d6 at level 14. Also at level 14, they gain the vengeful ancestors ability, which just makes it so the attacking creature takes force damage equal to the damage reduction rolled for spirit shield. All that said, this still all requires level 14, specific positioning, your reaction, the barbarian to be raging, the barbarian to be able to see the rogue, and a successful hit with an attack on the dragon as the first creature they hit in a turn. Still not unreasonable, but not something that couldn't easily be balanced with some additional enemies in the boss room, or even just the dragon taking advantage of the fact that it, ya know... has wings, and likely would be able to completely avoid the barbarian the entirety of combat if it wanted to.
It also certainly does not do this. CR isn't calculated with just damage, and even then CR is calculated based on the damage a creature does over the course of the first three rounds of combat, when it still has all its available resources. Just for example with a black dragon, even if the damage from every attack was being resisted and the barbarian was always rolling max damage reduction every time to effectively reduce that average damage output, it would still be CR 17 down from 21. Even just generally rolling average would be enough for that to effectively be 18. This is also assuming the dragon is basically never attacking or hitting the barbarian and that the barbarian is always attacking and hitting the dragon.
Now, none of this is to say that ancestral guardian isn't a powerful subclass, because it absolutely is. It pretty much forces the DM to either entirely focus on the barbarian with a given creature or put in a variety of minions that they may or may not have added anyway just to try to force the barbarian to hit something else and let the boss not be affected by pseudo compelled duel, but dragons in particular have a lot of options to deal with barbarians that it sounds to me like your DM likely wasn't taking full advantage of. Breath weapons alone can be pretty threatening to a barbarian that doesn't have some way of reliably getting resistance to elemental damage or having a high dex save bonus. Flight and reach on the dragon's attacks also generally would let it effectively play keepaway from a barbarian without much issue. Really in general monsters of similar CR tend to have legendary actions or passive abilities that can really screw over martial characters that don't have other options.
The CR system of 5e needs a little bit of finagling from the GMs side. It doesn't account for the action economy at all, which is 90% of how to balance an encounter. A dragon may be big and be above the parties CR, but it's only putting out 2 actions a turn as opposed to the parties 3 or 4 characters worth.
While I'd generally agree with this, it's worth mentioning that 5e does sort of try to account for action economy in a really indirect kind of way, at least when it comes to CR. CR seems to randomly exclude certain things, like damage done from legendary actions for instance. If they were included the same way different attack routines are for the average damage in a round that a creature does, a black dragon would be CR 25 instead of 21, just as an example. The DM's guide also does a similar thing that 3.5 did, effectively giving an "XP budget" for encounters to determine their difficulty, and while 5e definitely has a generally more forgiving system for the players, I feel like most if a DM with a level 17 party saw that a black dragon leaves an extra 7,700 xp in the budget for the encounter and add some minions or something to the fight. Between that and things like legendary actions and lair actions, high end monsters run with an understanding of how they work don't really require too much finagling most of the time, but it's a problem you'll definitely run into early game and a bit in the mid game, especially with newer DMs.
I'd also argue that while all of these are strong, almost none are quite overpowered either, really. Bladesinger's main benefit over other wizard subclasses is really the concentration protection. Most of the other benefits you can get you could get similar results from level 1 dips into other classes. It's gonna be a bit campaign dependent on whether or not a bladesinger would be better than say, a divination wizard for instance.
Twilight Cleric is pretty OP. There is no argument there, aside from it actually being fine to run and balance out a weaker party. It's also not too bad at low levels before you get the flight.
While druids generally are going to be really good at anything they want to be able to do, they likely aren't going to be great at all of those things at once. A lot of the time to be good at any given individual role between focusing on damage, tanking, and healing, you're not really going to be in a position to do one of those other roles. This is especially true if your party doesn't have something to double up with you on one of those roles, essentially forcing the druid to specialize in that direction. Some subclasses also focus on specializing the druid, and while the druid doesn't really give anything up for that specialization a lot of the time, if you're focusing on healing and buffing your party as a circle of the moon druid you're probably not making use of your class features at all.
Also, just to be clear, I'm not really trying to defend 5e here if it seems that way at all. I think the system has a lot of problems, and I generally don't really like it. I've played it a lot more out of necessity than anything else, because a lot of groups I've played with will either only play or only really know 5e, and that generally makes it more convenient. It definitely has tons of problems, especially when it comes to rules clarity and oversimplification of many mechanics from prior editions (I particularly mourn the loss of mechanical weapon variety). I just felt the need, as a player who plays barbarian religiously and a prior forever DM to a couple groups, to give my two cents on at least ancestral guardian and CR/encounter related mechanics.
I figured I'd run something by some fellow TTRPG players here. For my game reviews here on the site, I'm going to go over the important bits of the system itself of course, but I think I'm going to also rate them on some specific categories. So far, my three definite categories are:
-'Vibe Check' (how strong is the theming of the game, something like Shadowrun would get a 10/10 but something like GURPS would get a 5/10 by design)
-'How Fucked is the GM?' (how hard the game is to run and prep for, and how flexible is it GM wise)
-'Rules Clarity' (how easy is it to parse the rules, is the book well organized, etc.)
I want to avoid just giving some subjective 'the games bad because I don't like percentile dice' or something (I actually like d100 systems, that's just an example) so I figured doing some objective categories would help. Anybody have any thoughts or other category ideas?
I'd personally include something that might even be best left as something separate from the actual quality score of the system, but I feel like a general "crunch/complexity/depth" score would be valuable. I've known many people who were just completely turned off of solid systems that were just too complex or too simple for their tastes.
There is a game that we used to play ,strangely I've never seen anyone play it now,and I'm afraid I'm gonna forget it ,anyways the games is called sheep and wolf ,the structure is a small box (the barn) and under it a big box (the field) what bugs me is that I'm forgetting the exact dimensions ,but anyways there 20? sheeps and 2 wolfs ,the goal of the wolfs is to eat all sheeps and to do that they have to jump over them just like checkers ,and the goal of the sheeps is to get 9 sheep into the barn ,and that's it .i wonder if there is a real game out if it and it not some local game or something because we used pebbles as sheeps and brick pieces as wolfs and we Drew the "board" using coal
Also at level 14, they gain the vengeful ancestors ability, which just makes it so the attacking creature takes force damage equal to the damage reduction rolled for spirit shield.
Okay, I just assumed that would have required a reaction too. Never played with anything past the first few Unearthed Arcana's/Xanathurs. Back then the new subclasses were still relatively tame, some were even undertuned if anything (arcane archer, many of the wizard ones).
That's true, I forgot about the XP budget thing. I always just threw dretches at the party, those 1/4 CR fuckers hit so far above their weight just on the fetid cloud ability alone.
I'd personally include something that might even be best left as something separate from the actual quality score of the system, but I feel like a general "crunch/complexity/depth" score would be valuable. I've known many people who were just completely turned off of solid systems that were just too complex or too simple for their tastes.
'Crunch Factor', there we go. It's a good category actually. It also still makes sense to have that with Rule Clarity I think, as you can have complex systems that have a lot of layers to them but are easy to understand, or the opposite. Whether it's factored into the final score I'll mull over a little more. Thanks man.
It also certainly does not do this. CR isn't calculated with just damage, and even then CR is calculated based on the damage a creature does over the course of the first three rounds of combat, when it still has all its available resources. Just for example with a black dragon, even if the damage from every attack was being resisted and the barbarian was always rolling max damage reduction every time to effectively reduce that average damage output, it would still be CR 17 down from 21. Even just generally rolling average would be enough for that to effectively be 18. This is also assuming the dragon is basically never attacking or hitting the barbarian and that the barbarian is always attacking and hitting the dragon.
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