There is a small error on the math with the Barbarian damage from potential bonus action attacks through great weapon master, nothing that changes the conclusions of the video, but just to let you know I'm aware of it.
Why I make it that piecing, slashing & bludgeoning resistance applies to casters as well if they don't have a +1 to 3 focus/staff et cetera. It's not a perfect fix but certainly closes the gap of Martial & caster somewhat by limiting the spells a caster can use for most elemental damage spells are AOE & not single target. I just don't tell the casters that this is the case & suggest to all using the 3 damage type that their attack seem to hurt it but not as much as it should! This simple house rule solves the problem for the DM far more the bumping HP. If the caster happened to pick a single target damage spell like say disintegrate or eldritch blast then good for them but most casters have no single damage target damage spells. If they want to throw fireball or similar at a single target then let them & many creatures have resistance if not immunity to fire so the caster is not all save unless the picked wisely. I reward players for thinking & making logical choices unlike most DM's!
The weapon damage die is 2d6, so any feature that grants additional weapon die to a critical hit should reflect that, meaning its another 2d6, not just another 1d6.
@@arnijulian6241 "Most casters have no single damage target damage spells." Just from cantrips alone, I have to disagree with this. The most common ones are going to be dealing energy damage types - cold (ray of frost), fire (firebolt), force (eldritch blast), lightning (shocking grasp), necrotic (toll the dead), psychic (vicious mockery), and radiant (sacred flame) damage, just for example. There are relatively few spells that actually deal b/p/s damage. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rule you're using, but I don't see how imposing those resistances on spellcasting has any significant impact.
@@johnhodges2760 Ray of frost, toll of the dead, &shocking grasp at D8 to 4D8 are really not as great as people think. What people forget about these cantrips is no stat or + from a weapon is added. Shocking grasp is the worse of those you mentioned unless on a very select niece build as you have to enter melee/touch range of 5ft as caster. You can make toll of the dead work but takes effort though not worth it in my opinion. I mentioned 'Eldritch blast' but that is all the Warlock has going for it unless you realize the cantrip is a build trap. Eldritch blast isn't free as it takes invocation or multiclassing levels of investment which isn't often worth with the paladin being an exception to warlock but try getting that build past a DM that thematical. vicious mockery is funny but an awful damage cantrip as D4 to 4D4 even with the disadvantage on attacks is pitiful. A Tavern brawler grappler build using the shove action is so much more effective & a fun martial build I highly advise. Firebolt is not as great as people think even if D10 to 4D10 as no stat+ unless evoker or arcane domain cleric for instance. 188monsters have resistance 137 immunity to fire Non magical Bludgeoning, Slashing, Piercing 198 resistance 50 immunity. If fire did not have utility it would be worse as so many creatures in 5E are outright immune to fire. note: Cold 238 resistance & 101 immunity. Only damage worse then cold is poison 85 resistance & 531 immunity truly the worse damage type. of the 10 damage types that are not Bludgeoning, piecing & slashing that if grouped together as 1 are ranked 7/11 without magic items just behind lightning & damage type. With magic weapons said group excluding slashing ranks 4/11 in resistance /immunity. Bludgeoning 36 resistance 1 immunity 22 vulnerabilities. Magical Bludgeoning is great damage type of the used by melee. Piercing 45 resistance 0 immunity Slashing 26 resistance 9 immunity Only greater damage types once magic weapons used in this order: (3) Thunder 18 Resist 18 Immune 5 vulnerable (2) Radiant 21R ,10 I &13 V (1) Force 6 R, 4 I & 2 V Few cantrips & spells have these 3 top tier damage types. Note: These resistance & immunity figures are for base 5e without expansion book but give a rough perspective. Sacred flame 'The target gains no benefit from cover for this saving throw.' is it's real strength. If it was not radiant it would not be 1/2 as good. Mind this isn't for DPR but sniping from cover. Not every cleric will do this or build for it. Chill touch is not great for DPR but is excellent cantrip for 1 reason. Target ''it can't regain hit points until the start of your next turn. Until then, the hand clings to the target.'' worse named cantrip in the game but is so very useful if you read through it. Mind Sliver is excellent but not for damage but it targets intelligence save though only D6 to 4d6 the added benefit of '' subtract 1d4 from the next saving throw it makes before the end of your next turn''. Mind sliver is for caster that want to make sure 1 time important single target effect spells land more consistently! Few caster play this way though it is very nice. Acid splash is simply awful even with good damage & type as it puts casters to close to melee. You see damage cantrips are really not as great as you think. My solution to non magical weapon resistance/immunity is not completely resolved but since the martial are not told & nor are casters directly told that make mistakes it tends to balance out better then might think. Easiest way to close the martial caster gap some as a DM is give martial magic items like Javelin of Lightning for 1 time use range lightning. +1 low level play & +2 mid level play armour goes a long way for martials if you keep +1 armour for caster to mid & +2 to high & +3 to late play. DM's really should read magic items every time before giving them out planned ahead of time if at all. I purposely put out less Items that would benefit a caster as they don't simply don't need it. I tend to give 1 appropriate Magic item out for each plater character then 1 extra more powerful that could only benefit a martial but take great caution in handing out magic weapons, staff or anything that effects damage!
damage resistance has always been easy to deal with as a DM.... If your warrior cant afford a +1 weapon... have a mage cast light or fairy fire on it..... it sadly counts... which is why I prefer 3.0e DR rules.
@@saeedrazavi4428Yup. I learned Pokemon's meta to help my son in a tournament years ago. Then when he got better we would each buy a version of the new games and Nuzlocke race each other. After all that time combing thru psypoke and serebii for type matchups, IV, and EV info, the 5e monster type stuff is kind of underwhelming.
You really should be giving martial characters a magical weapon along the way, for other reasons already. By the time this resistance is very common, you should be there. You give a few encounters in the transition period where they have to work around it. Yes there is some DM dependency here, but if you have. Dick DM that would constantly throw these fights at martials with no magical weapons, they would just be a dick otherways
When I first started playing 5e a few years ago, the fighter in my party was using a war hammer at level one. Then we encountered some skeletons, and we learned that they are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage and only bludgeoning damage. He then picked up a long sword and a morning star, so he always had access to the three different weapon damage types, and went Battle Master subclass at level 3. We never encountered anything that his different weapons made any difference on again - because those monsters don't exist. It was a real let-down.
@@TreantmonksTemple because Wotc creators are lazy and cant figure things out. That is why there are these new editions, because nobody wants to do any math or figuring things out anymore like was the case in old school D&D. That is why new editions are nowhere near as good as other rpgs out there and older versions of D&D.
@@1asnyd yeah looking in the gurps rule book is like looking at a written masterpiece of flexibility mixed with clear guidelines if a character gets drunk I know he’s drunk if the character is under an illusion I know how that works and there’s no case where the system gives up and says “idk advantage” like with 5e that gave up half way designing combat and said advantage
It's more for the gm to keep track of though, so maybe they thought the benefit wasn't worth the additional mental burden? Not everyone is as experienced as I assume the present company is after all.
I can at least see where they are coming from with werewolf immunity. In some folklore they they could only be injured by silver bullets, so their immunity reflects that.
Some of that is just description. If you like the imagery of Werewolves healing any type of damage then you can still describe their bones shattering or an arrow piercing their eye and then it knitting back together before they take their action. Thr effect in game is the same, but it's a pretty cool reveal that their actions were fruitless.
In previous editions, they did. However that rule, along with many others, was deemed just one of the Many instances of 'too much book keeping' that apparently kept the bulk of the current player base out of the hobby. In reality, you can always flavor their resistance as regeneration anyway. They don't "take less damage," instead the wound inflicted "suddenly heals shut" after they're struck by the wrong weapon type. Same mechanical outcome, but with different flavor.
Van Richten's Guide reprinted the wereravens who appeared in Curse of Strahd and made that exact change. To keep them from being too powerful, I would personally rule that critical hits would also shut off regeneration for a turn.
I would add another piece of evidence is that they removed the extra Divine Smite damage for fiends and undead. That makes sense if radiant vulnerability is more common for those monster types.
Huh, I didn't realize that until you said it had been removed. I too have been wanting to see vulnerabilities added in the rules as written in 5E; It just makes sense in a lot of cases. Likely rarely played upon due to WotC's desire to homogenize everything. I use vulnerabilities in my games though because why wouldn't you use them?
That's what I thought. Maybe we will actually see a more useful and a more expanded resistance/vulnerability system. Then the options to change/choose damage types makes a lot more sense! Of course that would be good to know for playtest purposes...
Transitioning from 4E to 5E (I also played 3E), I was annoyed by the retrograde evolution in regard to resistances, and by the near non-presence of vulnerabilities. I definitely hope their philosophy has changed for OneD&D. This is one of those things for which people always "helpfully" offer, "You can change it at your table." Yes, I can. That doesn't change the subliminal annoyance I've felt each of the hundreds (thousands?) of times it arises. I'm pleased to see that I'm not alone. I don't recall anyone ever agreeing with this gripe of mine.
honestly we really at the point where we need that martials/weapons playtest to really understand what their goals are in 1D&D. Like with unarmed strikes, there are very few ways to have those be magical but they clearly want the moon druid to be using them and giving the paladin the option as well.
That's the one that I've been looking forward to the most. How are they going to compensate for the loss of power attack mechanics? Are martials going to be buffed in relation to casters (who have been buffed themselves already)? Is monk not going to suck finally?
One solution I might try pursuing is not make all +1 magical....it might be just from being of exceptional crafting quality or materials, and make a "+1 magical enhancement" something that a magic weapon CAN have, but isn't guaranteed
@@mogalixir that could be said with all resistances though. while you can argue that in some ways casters can overcome the resistance by virtue of spell diversity, it's clear that the math for resistances weren't thought of with build viability in mind. you simply are not allowed to brute force any given creature with a resistance and you're expected to play around it, whether or not they designed your class or subclass to do so. previous editions, competitors, and 3rd party content all were able to overcome the problem. there's flat resistances that allow glass canons or bruisers of a specific damage type to brute force it. there's not granting resistances to all three mundane damage types so the simple act of carrying a shortsword and hammer along with your longsword would feel useful to a martial. and there's designing consumables so that a bonus action can allow martials to apply magic damage to the weapon. putting a shred of thought in giving a mundane damage dealer solutions is really all they have to do. elemental bane exists for casters that want to lean on one specific element, so the way I see it, the problem at its core is that they're failing to put thoughts to giving players straightforward solutions to the challenges they create.
Summary of a Session 0 as we finished one campaign and started another: DM: I am going to be giving out fewer magic items in this next campaign. Player: I'm going to play an Artificer.
I specifically forbid two options from Tasha's in advance: Artificers and Twilight domain clerics. First one gets tons of magic items on top of regular class abilities, i.e. attacks and spellcasting, and the second one gives literal hundreds of temporary HP per day and 300 ft darkvision which is rediculous.
One of the things I learned the hard way as a DM is to just make sure martials aren't dealing with resistance to non-magical BPS. Like...hand out +0 common weapons like Moon Touched Sword if the party is about to face enemies with this kind of resistance. Not just because of balance. Also because my martial heavy party would against some monsters just take twice as long, and frankly my players found it really unintuitive "why is the vampire spawn taking way more damage to kill than the dragon we killed?"
@@DeadpoolAli you can just....play pf2? It's a great game that solves a lot of the problems people have with 5e so why wait for a dnd game when pf2 is right there?
@@willchurch8376 yeah i get that but they said "a lot of great fixes", I can understand if you only like martials being fixed or saving throws being fixed or the 3 action system etc but if you like a lot of the changes then why not just play it? I guess there could be some major turnoff but it'd be wierd if that outweighed all the bits someone prefers over 5e.
One idea that I've personally been playing round with is, rather than a resistance to nonmagical weapon attacks, I give them a reduction to the damage the creature takes from weapon attacks instead, via a feature that the creature has. It's something that: - makes creature design for player level easier (some creatures can be anywhere from cakewalks to impossible based solely on access to magic weapons) - doesn't punish martials to an unfair degree (because a -1/-2/-3/whatever or -3 per hit will tend to only be a fraction of the damage they are capable of) - puts some control on the fodder summons (because their damage per hit tends to be lower than a PC's) - has precedent for PCs but doesn't come up as often for creatures for some reason (because Heavy Armor Master feat has been a thing since the PHB, and we KNOW it's effective for low-level parties, so why not low-level creatures) - can serve as the middle between weapon damage resistance and weapon damage immunity, when applicable (sort of, since reduction happens before resistance, but it's something extra) - can easily be justified on a creature-by creature basis (based on anatomy, magic, etc.) It's not perfect, either, but it DOES address my own grievance as far as people taking magic weapons because they HAVE to, rather than because they WANT to. Which is to say, I want my players to have magic weapons because they think they're cool, not because they're necessary.
I want to toss an extra thing I'd like to see changed in addition to virtually everything this video mentions. We see this a lot in those damage resistance/immunity bit: "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical ***attacks***" I'd like to see that "Attack" part taken out or at least considered more. Its silly to me that you can be a Werewolf and a Giant can throw a Rock at you as an attack, and you are immune to that, yet if that same Giant drops a Rock on you making the Werewolf make a DEX save, they can actually take damage from that. Its real silly. Some creatures like the Demon Lords have this text: " bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing that is nonmagical" which covers a much wider bases and is so rare in 5e and should have been used more. One of the more interesting one's I've found are the "Sorrowsworns" they all have this in their resistances: "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing while in dim light or darkness" This should be used more, conditional unique situations where that resistance can apply. Shadow Dragons have something similar.
Ive also played with way too many DMs who didnt really understand the difference between magical, and non magical. so when i would go out of my way to pick options that did magical damage, enemies where still resistant to all my attacks.
I really appreciate your videos because you don't ever, if at all, stop at just explaining why something is bad, but you come up with a solution and even give some examples.
Cool ideas: More unique resistances and vulnerabilities Unique ways to remove monster resistances (ex. Undead that can only be hurt by the weapon that killed it, evil wizard that can only be hurt after a certain magical artifact has been destroyed) Effects for different damage types (Or at least unique spell effects for spells of different damage types) Magic weapons with more interesting damage types and effect
Chris, you are such an insightful game designer. I think the next thing WotC should actually do is hire you. Or better yet, you should be their independent third party consultant. Thank you for your work.
I like the sound of independent consultant WAY more than being hired as staff by WotC. I'm getting very used to being my own boss, and not sure I would like going back. Of course, WotC doesn't need to hire me at all for consulting, they can just watch my videos!
If a monster had vulnerability to silver, I think it would be neat if a fighter would need a silver weapon or silver arrowheads, but also the casters would also need to burn silver as part of their spell components (with a monetary value, so can't be bypassed with a focus). It would lean into the flavor of learning a monster and preparing to fight them.
Dnd really needs different effects for the different damage types: For example, for every cold damage, your speed is reduced 1 ft for the next round. Poison damage is increased by 1 die when you are bloodied (less than half hp). Etc.
Also, if we could have a reworked magic item system, à la 4e, where every magic weapon has a level, you could have stuff like a monster has Resistance to slashing Lv. 8 - and then you deal damage according to a function of Res. Level and Magic Weapon level. For example, if I have a Lv 5 magic sword, my damage is reduced by 3 against a monster with Res 8.
I'm taking this. But I'm kind enough to leave a contribution or two before I go. I've got manners. •Psychic damage over the target's passive Con breaks concentration and prevents concentration spells until the end of their next turn. •Radiant damage is the same, but blinds. Force damage over the target's passive Str will push them away said number of feet. We can literally do this all day.
@Vyrelion So something similar to Temp Hp / AC against magic specifically. I'll be taking this too. How would you feel about abilities that can rend this resistance? I.e. reduce the level by a certain amount, and once it's reduced by say, more than 3/4, their magic res is gone.
@@gammagong9435 for Psychic i was thinking : add half the damage taken to the Con save dc for concentration. You take 8 damage, it's a dc 14 con check. You take 18, it's a 19 DC.
@@gammagong9435 regarding Resistance and Magic weapons: i think if you go the easy route (reduce damage inflicted by the difference in lvl betweem Res and weapon), you can just have weapons that for example "every hit with this reduces resistances by 1 for 10 min", or "this weapon is considered 5 levels higher for the purpose of damaging constructs"
The way they handle vulnerabilities and resistances in PE2 is a lot more like what you are shooting for. It feels really good when my magus finds out that a monster is vulnerable to something and then queueing up that damage type for a spell strike. Especially if I can tack on some typed persistent damage.
Good video Chris. I feel like some of the assumptions and ideas the original 5e designers had regarding magical weapons have not played out exactly as envisioned. Glad we’re getting a chance at a revisit.
The problem with the vulnerability is that it makes the player do the same action over and over. Whereas resistance invites you to think outside the box and do one of several different types of damage
That is true, but at the same time there is more than one way to skin a cat. In a vacuum, yes, simply hitting it with the same attack it is vulnerable to over and over is boring. In practice, you must consider environmental factors. For example, the party is fighting some giant beast that is vulnerable to, say, fire damage. Yes, you COULD just sit there and fire bolt it to death, or you could create a boulder trap, or any other number of possibilities. Also, attacking with a hammer may mean more than simply roll to hit over and over, since it seems they will be changing martials and weapons significantly in One D&D. We will just have to see.
Resistance is not the problem. One-trick pony enemy design is. Restrict its damage vulnerability to attacks from a certain angle or position (eg, the underbelly of a creature being vulnerable to piercing); meanwhile, the creature has a special attack that it either only can or can more easily perform against creatures in extremely close ranges. Or make damaging the creature with its damage vulnerability give it an an attack and damage bonus each time, sending it into a frenzy. Or give the creatures stages or transformations, where each time it is subjected to a damage type or condition, it opens up an opportunity for something worse; crack open a shell with sufficient resisted piercing or bludgeoning damage to expose the soft tissue which has a lot of vulnerabilities, or give a tall creature a vulnerable mouth that can be pried open with a grapple if you can make the creature prone first. Create tension in choosing to set up a vulnerability or in choosing to capitalize on it by pairing it with a heightened risk or trade-off.
4e style resistances are 3e style resistances. 1e, 2e and 5e by and large treat resistance the same, if you use an attack that is resisted, you deal half damage. 3e/4e had resistance be an threshold that was resisted, typically 10/20/30, sometimes 5/15. 1e/2e mostly had +x or immune when it came to physical damages. 3e introduced +x or resist. 30/+3 instead of +3 weapon to hit. 3.5 changed it to 'magic' and 'epic', which ended up making it the same as 5e, either a really big pain in the ass or not even a considered factor. I think 4e removed it entirely from the game. I think my preference would be to go back to something similar to 3.5 style resistance, but make it interact a little differently with magic weapons. Have each + of a weapon treat DR /magic as 5 less than the listed amount. So if you hit a dragon with DR 20/magic, it resists 15 damage from a +1 sword, and no damage from a +4 sword. Then make sure that only creatures that REALLY need to be resistant to non-magical weapons have any DR /magic in the first place. I much prefer a werewolf taking extra damage from silver weapons and not being able to heal the wounds than being immune to any non-silver weapon.
It was better in the earlier editions when you needed +1, +2 or +3 to hit certain monsters. Alot more variation and it was not unfair towards martial classes either as there were many monsters with magic resistance in percentage that could completely resist any magic. Again the over simplification causes issues that never existed before.
@@TreantmonksTemple Yeah I remeber our group once encountering a ju-ju zombie before any of us had obtained any magic weapons and at that level, maybe 2 or 3, the magic-user and cleric didn't have much to offer either. But then you flee, that is almost always an option. In 2e magic weapons played a way more significant role in the power up of characters which was fun in some ways and annoying in others.
@@jocke6703 My guess is that a poor DM might be the sort that under delivers the magic weapons required to hit certain monsters, and overuses those monsters, without providing any in-game solution to obtaining said weapons. And of course, if running away simply means getting hit on the way out without any real means of escaping, it becomes a choice between multiple un-fun options all of which end in defeat.
you become more and more a person i wish was at d&d's game design team! your ideas are so good, easy to implement and just interesting to play around! i wish for me, you and all of us d&d players that WOTC is seeing you and considering your ideas... keep up the amazing work!
Wow - how thoughtful, Chris. The only problem I see, is that so many of these problems are interrelated and tricky, that any redesign is going to need a re-cast conceptualization. I hope that we do see some of these "sensible" improvements you're suggesting, many of which hearken back to 3.0, but that changes made don't require everyone to have to scrap their old books. "Game enhancement" always carries that risk.
Each creature should have a Triangle of resistance, Vulnerability, and normal in terms of the three weapon damage and/or melee vs ranged; Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing. And sprinkle in some immunities where applicable. I love games where ranged attacks are effective against flying creatures. It just makes sense. Armors should have a take on the triangle of weaknesses, like plate resist slash, pierce is normal, vulnerable to bludgeoning. Whereas chainmail resist slash, normal bludgeoning, weak to piercing.
Definitely not a fan of the random resistances to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing and would be happy to see it go. I absolutely agree that I would love a revamped vulnerability and resistance system that more creatures engaged with that makes damage type matter more. Like how skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning, I think that’s awesome. I even think they should resist piercing. Figuring those things out could be a lot of fun. On another note, my solution in 5e has been to just hand out +0 magical weapons to all martials at around level 5. Then spells are still limited but martials don’t suffer.
Never really thought about it until this moment but I think you are right. As a DM I dont enjoy balancing around it and carefully picking monsters to avoid confronting players with this too much or too early. I would actually like to see this done away in 6th edition.
My dm has already started requiring Adamantine and Silver. We’re going to go more into it next campaign more with Spelljammer. But he started realizing it as an issue 2 years into running our DoTMM. About the 14th level with crystal golems I believe. (We’re now on the 19th level. Started the game November 2020) Your suggestion of using vulnerabilities more is exactly what we came up with to fix it when him and I talked in PMs in discord. With Spelljammer the magical weapons would be common of just having different damage types without any bonuses making them readily available.
I think another benefit is diversifying combat. Imagine using the observant and other similar feats that now grant bonus action searches. You could use that to discover what a creature is vulnerable/resistant to. Makes those feats worth taking for combat
You know I think this is something many of us just didn’t think about in a judgement way! I’m glad we’re discussing it now, before the (hopefully) end.
This definitely attributes to the major problem that is CR. If they keep this mechanic around, they should almost add rules about adjusting CR if your martial characters possess magical weapons or not. That grick may be CR2 if 50% of the party does half damage, but only CR1 if they have the tools to overcome it. I know that there is more to CR than HP and Resistances, but if it looked something like CR2(1) so that proficiencies weren’t altered, or there was just a table for adjusting.
Yes! I love damage vulnerabilities. I played with a dm who would always give foes at least one if it made sense and it was always a lot of fun poking and prodding for weaknesses till I found one I could exploit
I got to customize my Hexblade’s pact weapon a bit, and one of the properties I created was “Eldritch Alloy”. Basically, with enough of a special metal and a ritual, the sword can absorb the properties of that metal, which it can later reproduce. The sample metal has to be about twice the volume of the sword, and afterwards it crumbles to dust. The sword houses the patron so while she started as regular steel, she’s been upgraded quite a lot by now. She’s absorbed silver to combat undead and lycanthropes, she can copy cold iron for fey, she can shift to adamantine for constructs and door-breaking, and she’s light to carry because of mithral. I’ve even had her absorb some strongly magnetized iron so she can sense direction. The DM has enjoyed having Gwenwyn-Llyn-Du (I often use Welsh for Elvish) as a mouthpiece in the party that’s not a DMPC. It’s more flavor than necessary mechanics, but I like the idea of the different metallic properties mattering.
I'm curious about what your opinion of a numerical resistance is. For example, removing the first few points of damage to each attack coming in, rather than halving the damage. This could even out the damages between a great weapon wielded by a barbarian and multiple summoned creatures.
Maybe, but IMO its just a side grade. Half is easy, and multiple creatures is a problem for more reasons than just power level. Resistance doesn't seem like a way to balance them at all imo, I think the should just be fair or more likely not exist in the 16 animals space.
I 100% agree. The crazy thing to me is that all the necessary factors for a Pokemon level type chart exist, but aren't used. Fiends could be vulnerable to radiant damage and resistant to fire. Humanoids could be vulnerable to poison or fire damage. Constructs could be vulnerable to lightning damage. Undead are vulnerable to fire and radiant. Elementals could be vulnerable to thunder damage, as it dissipates their form. And then allow exceptions based on the individual creature. Some elementals could be not vulnerable to thunder, but it would be an exception, for example. In fact, we have more opportunities in D&D for interesting resistance/vulnerability combos than Pokemon. Make every creature with an INT of less than 5 vulnerable or resistant to psychic damage, and make every creature with more than 22 INT the other way. Instead we get virtually no vulnerabilities, lots of resistances, and one method to substantially counteract resistances (magic weapons) which functionally makes it all moot. At least give us something to do with these mechanics, WOTC, even if you don't want to standardize creature types.
I agree Chris! Monsters like Specters having resistance to normal weapons makes some sense. But, a Grick? What?!? Needing a silvered weapon for optimization against werewolves needs to be there, but completely immune to a sword that could maybe lop an arm off? Also, RAW any lycanthrope could fall from a cliff and take the max amount of fall damage and just get up, brush off and walk away. Even vampires having resistance to non magical damage is arguable.
On the flip side, I think ghosts should have IMMUNITY to non-magical bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage. It makes no sense to me that an ordinary sword or arrow would harm an incorporeal spirit. I might even give the ghost RESISTANCE to MAGICAL b/p/s damage.
In early editions of D&D, 1st edition through 3rd edition had creatures with resistance or immunity to non-magical weapons that could actually be resistant to magical weapons as well up to a certain modifier. So some were vulnerable to just any magical weapon, some had to be hit by a +1 weapon, or +2, +3, etc. up to some of the demon princes that required a +6 weapon to penetrate its damage reduction. It handled this problem great. And with 5e only have magical bonuses up to +3, that just means scaling the resistance down, so maybe demon princes and solars would maintain resistance to weapons of +2 enchantment but not +3, lesser demons and devils would have less resistance. And this also brings back the idea of cold iron or silver or wood or whatever material a particular creature is vulnerable to also penetrating the resistance without having to be enchanted at all.
the way i see it, needing a magic weapon is code words for "you better be an adventurer". every adventurer should have magic at their disposal, and older editions were based around this. in 5th edition, less importance was placed on magic items, which threw off the balance. i wish magic item crafting was more in depth, magic items had a gold cost associated with them, and players had more agency in determining their character outside of class features. on the flip side, i wish magic casters had a little bit more need for keeping their spells in check; it becomes kinda boring after a while if you face no resistance. though i guess magic users have to deal with resistance types more frequently. it'd be cool if resistance wasn't just a flat half damage, and vulnerabilities came back. i seem to remember damage ranks being a thing, but i guess that was thrown out the window for simplicity's sake.
When a common magic item, something you could easily find in any town, circumvents an entire game mechanic, the item is either overpowered, or the mechanic is poorly considered. I challenge you to find anyone that thinks a Moon-Touched Sword is an OP item. It is definitely part of a problem in D&D, where 90% of the special weapons are swords by default and push everyone into using the same weapon, because you know that unless the DM is consciously correcting the game's bias, all the loot will be swords.
Yeah if I had the option to take a +1 weapon over a weapon that glows dimly but does nothing else the obvious choice is the +1 weapon. That being said a glowing weapon is better than a normal weapon. It seems like a dumb oversight that "magic weapons" exist that give bonuses to hit but do nothing else, but a moon touched sword which does nothing at all except glow both are categorically "magic weapons" and thus overcome non-magic resistances when all the sword does is glow.
@@snazzyfeathers In earlier editions, higher level monsters would require higher bonuses on weapons to overcome their resistances, so for example, a low tier monster might require any magic weapon to overcome its damage resistance, but a higher tier monster would need a minimum +2 weapon
100% agree. I've personally wanted to make a homebrew rule to add more vulnerabilities to creatures by type, and part of the issue I ran into was I think resistance and vulnerability kinda need rebalancing themselves too. Double damage is a lot, so it makes a bit more sense why creatures are rarely ever vulnerable to anything and have the hp for it to matter. half the vulnerabilities in the monster manual are mephits with like 7 hp each for example. This game doesn't need to be pokemon, but I wish it were more like pokemon than it is currently. the lore ecology and blatant signifiers don't currently mean anything, and they should. This is a pretty expansive thing too, when I was making homebrew for vulnerability by creature type some of my thoughts were the opposite for some creatures. For example oozes, in my mind they generally have a sort of liquid body, so most damage types don't make much sense. To me, extreme temperatures, lightning (I assume theyre controlled by electrical signals) and magical force to attack their more magical nature make the most sense. But when I look at monster manual entries for the oozes, several are resistant or immune to fire or cold damage, as well as random immunities to lightning damage. So I feel like design wise it would be pertinent to have some general themes for what creature types could be weaker or stronger against certain damage types, although there can always be exceptions to that rule. Overall I'd like a large redesign of the mechanic that fosters more adventurous thinking and less necessary calculations like fire and poison being useless types and force and radiant being incredible.
what I would like to see is weapons having different damage/hit characteristics for example: longsword: 1d8 slashing/1d8 piercing/ 1d4 bludgeoning; sabre: 1d10 slahing/1d5 piercing/ 1d4 bludgeoning; warhammer: 0 slashing/ 1d10 piercing/ 1d10 bludgeoning I would also like to see the same idea for armor, giving ac against damage types.
Recently I've started playing around with damage types in my game, in order to address this very issue. I started to change enemies with this resistance in my game to just have resistance to physical damage, but vulnerability to something weird that isn't an actual damage type. For instance, the latest enemie was a creature, basically made of water. So I gave it vulnerability to salt and dehydrating effects. If the fighter takes some salt from their cook's utensils and rubs it on their axe, that counts as salt damage. A vampire could have vulnerability to wooden piercing damage, an iron golem might have vulnerability to the tools of a forge, a ghost might have vulnerability to incense, etc. There are tons of things you could get creative with. I haven't had many opportunities to try this out just yet, but so far my players were big fans.
I hope they redesign the Classes in OneDnD with eye towards creating a consistent player experience. For certain classes to either suck or be great depending entirely on whether your DM gives out +1 weapons or whether your party takes Short Rests results in such a frustrating experience across the player base.
I think this is less a monster problem and more a magic item problem. if I got my way, gold would be correlated to HP and you'd have very clear guidelines on what magic items you can/should buy at which levels. When is the right time for martials to get a +1 weapon? What about casters getting that expensive component? How many spell scrolls should a wizard find? This would make it even possible for CR to acount for magic items, which it doesn't except for one horrible way: including resistances and immunities into the calculations, meaning that the party having magic weapons makes CR even more unreliable.
Furthermore, you could make tools valuable by giving players the opportunity to craft certain magic items, meaning that their cost goes down and they can buy more stuff. This would make tool proficiency somewhat useful as opposed to something you can give 7 of because it doesn't matter either way. You could also involve players in the process by giving them the chance to request items that follow the guidelines and that they0ll get upon leveling up... we can dream.
I really hope they are thinking along the same lines as you are. It's actually the same as I've been thinking as well, although you've said it much more eloquently than I could have. And I especially echo what you said on Vulnerabilities. There should be WAY MORE vulnerabilities.
I really hope they add more vulnerabilities to the game! It always feels better from a players perspective to do extra damage by changing your damage type (especially if you have a choice of damage type) then just to avoid halving your damage.
EDIT: wow youtube edited out some of my writing here! It took out my examples...! Yes, I pretty much agree, things need to be re-done. I re-did all monsters back in the day, just as you explained at the end of the video...I remove things that make no sense, and add vulnerabilities...you know, water vulnerability to things that are on fire! Think of it this way, most players will not know these stats, but when they figure it out, it is such a massive boon for them in future encounters. We need D&D to fix these things like you have mentioned, because let's face it, not everyone has the time or patients to homebrew everything.
Like not having magic items as a catch all. In Zelda games, Link uses a magic sword 90% of the time but final battle against Ganon requires Silver arrows, you cannot win the game with just a sword
I really hope that the game does away with resistance to non-magical weapons. Sure, I understand some of the lore reasons that it could be interesting; something that is just so powerful that you need magic to defeat it! But mechanically, it feels like it's more of a punishment for weapon users. It's not up to them when they can get a magic weapon, it's up to the DM. It is also up to the DM to present enemies resistant or immune to non-magic weapons. And ultimately, that punishment is not fun for the players who chose to use weapons instead of cast spells. I felt that pain as a rogue, when our party faced some vampire spawn, and what should have been a really strong Sneak Attack damage was halved because my bow and arrows weren't magic, and our wizard was out there putting me to shame. I felt useless the whole fight.
I'm so glad that I came across this, because this just confirms that my idea of giving vulnerabilities and various resistances is not a bad idea. Ever since the D&D drama, I had been pushing to polish off my own tabletop system and I wanted to utilize those resistances/immunities/vulnerabilities, because it reminds me of monsters from the Witcher. The idea of having monsters that will have specific weaknesses, and potentially some non-magical means (such as certain herbs or actions that can be taken) that are capable of hindering or weakening the monster. The idea was just to promote a sort of puzzle-like encounter. the fight is easier if you know what you're fighting. but if you don't know. then you're going to have a much harder time. I hoped to make the system at least kind of compatible with 5e but have some extra depth/crunch that can help promote some build variety.. and also help even out the disparity between martials and spellcasters. The main goal is to kinda take a page out of Pathfinder 2e's book, and give more free-form features that can be chosen. I'm really hoping I can get enough of this system polished off to the point that I can release a sort of playtest/beta version of this game. simplified, only a few levels.. just to gauge reactions to it. I have no idea where I would release that kind of playtest for people.. Idk how well it will work, or even if it succeeds; but I do hope that if its a system that even a handful of people end up liking. I'll count that as a win.
Personally i just dont think immunity to piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning should exist at all. Its basically just saying "You dont get to participate in this fight" to martials.
The problem with Vulnerability is that double damage is too strong. DnD needs pathfinders Weakness system where rather than just doubling the damage, it lists a value and every time that creature takes that kind of damage, it takes more damage equal to the weakness value. So for example, lets say we have a Treant with "Weakness 5 to Fire damage." Everytime it takes fire damage, you add 5 extra damage to the damage dealt. That way, you can make it much more frequent and it allows you a variability in just how weak something is to a kind of damage. So Vampires can have weakness 20 to Sunlight, Trolls weakness 10 to fire, etc. It's just more elegant.
It's easy enough to add that ability to the creature's sheet. Granted, the DM shouldn't have to do it. This should've been part of the game system. They just tried to make the game as quick and easy to play as possible and some things got missed.
@Treantmonk's Temple There are a few house rules you could do for the Magic Arrow feature at level 7. One is make it so the arrow is conjured as you shoot (you choose the flavor), so no more ammunition requirement. If you don't track ammunition to begin with, then you can make it so the entire bow is conjured when you make a shooting motion. Sure, it's still outdone once you get a magic bow, but you'll never be without a weapon if you find yourself separated from that bow. That's great for a fighter. Another option could be that when you make the arrow magical (whether you're imbuing regular ammunition or conjuring an arrow as per above), the arrow itself becomes +1 and gets added to the attack/damage separately from any bow modifiers. Have a regular bow? It's now functionally a +1 weapon. Have a +1 bow already? It's now effectively a +2.
In my game, I've added mundane weapons with extra benefits along with consumable weapon greases (taken from Elden Ring) to convert the damage type to give martial classes extra options. Also I've had the same idea with my custom monsters as you did in the video, such as stone golems resistant to slashing, piercing, fire, and necrotic but vulnerable to blunt and thunder/sonic. Tying into the new weapons, a new anti-armor weapon gives a higher chance to hit and bypasses the golem's slashing and piercing resistances.
I really like your idea about creatures having a resistance to piercing but not slashing, etc. When I first started playing, one of the first creatures we ever encountered was a skeleton, which took double damage from bludgeoning, and I was excited about the idea that choosing the right weapon could help you in a fight .... only to realize the skeleton is one of the very few monsters that actually uses this idea creatively, and most of them just have that repeated resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. I would love if more monsters took advantage of this mechanic! Plus, you're totally right that it would create incentives to carry a few weapons to suit different situations, especially for a Fighter or Barbarian, whose class makes them an expert in using many types of weapon, but right now there's not much incentive to do anything besides focus on one weapon that you've chosen the right feats for. Maybe you could still specialize in your main greatsword, but carry a mace or rapier to use when the right situation comes up, and this would be an advantage for martial classes, as opposed to casters and simple weapon classes who have fewer weapon options.
They really say screw the martials here's damage resistance and immunity vs them, but so far as I'm aware there are no monsters that require you to hit them with mundane damage. Because oh no what is the wizard gonna do if his spells have no effect? We can't have a player not making an impact on the combat! Nono, ignore that we do it to the martials >:-(
The problem with vulnerabilities is that they are too impactful. I mean, if you do 30 fire damage to a tree (which is not hard to achieve with fireball etc.), it becomes 60 (so 30 damage difference). So vulnerabilities are the opposite of imunities. This makes sense here and there, but on a horse against which a spear might be slightly more effective than a hammer, a vulnerability would be far too much. The same is true for player characters (a skeleton race with vulnerability to bludgeoning damage would suffer a lot, I think). Therefore my idea would be to introduce an upper limit. So the skeletal Naga is weak against bludgeoning damage up to 20 damage. Meaning you do 10 damage, do 20. you do 30 damage, do 50. you do 70 damage, do 90.
I made a lot of homebrew changes because my group are a bunch of min/maxers so it is in our DNA to abuse everything. We eventually moved out of D&D and made our own systems due to that, it was easier than fixing D&D problems and we could steal good ideas from a wide variety of different systems and modify them for our own amusement without having to worry about copyright or other legal issues as we never published those systems. What I did in my homebrew was have very limited immunity, things like a fire elemental were immune to any fire attacks, we relied on a modified resistance/penetration system. I had resistances being more common and at various CR thresholds everything hit basic physical damage resistances. I changed resistance from 50% to -1 damage on each die roll of that element for each tier of resistance and higher CR npcs with resistance had higher tiers. Magic weapons of that element penetrated a tier of resistance for each plus it had, so a +3 magic weapon that did piercing would ignore up to T3 piercing resistance, but would suffer -1 on T4, -2 on T5, etc. This was our resistance/penetration system and it applied to every dice roll, so if something had T3 piercing resistance any 1-3s on a D6 would be counted as zeros and you would only get bonuses added to those rolls. It sounds convoluted but it played really well once people get used to it, it is a bit like shooting a rifle at a tank, a big enough hit will damage it but smaller arms fire wont. It made attacks or spells that used higher damage dice feel more potent but sometimes we had to modify things on the fly if something felt too powerful for it's CR. I didn't mind people using animate weapon or other summons to help counter encounters with a lot of combatants. As a DM I don't really want to get bogged down with having to deal with the Cutlery Wizard or the Jurassic Park Druid to take down high CR mobs through cheese. It is just too much number crunching, I don't think it adds anything to the game to get bogged down with excessive dice rolling and tracking all their hp, movement, etc. So we just changed those two spells, I am okay with 1, 2 or 3 more significant summons, D&D is cumbersome with large numbers of combatants and I tried to avoid it by having higher challenge, lower number encounters as much as humanly possible.
I've added various resistances and vulnerabilities to monsters, which makes combats more interesting for my players! I've tried both the standard vulnerability (double damage) and "if you deal bludgeoning damage, deal 5 extra damage" or some other number which feels good.
I think they could allow specific damage types to be dealt to a creature causing a feature to be unavailable for a round (like a troll taking fire damage stops it from regenerating for that round) far more often. For instance, if you hit that Bone Naga with non-magical bludgeoning damage, they lose half their speed for their next turn. Maybe you could even have magical bludgeoning damage make them instantly fall prone if it reaches a certain threshold? That would add a reason to have magical damage for your attacks, but wouldn't make the person with a normal maul feel left out. I might add that feature to bone monsters in general, just make the thresholds different for each monster. I could add a feature for mechanical monsters that they lose access to a feature (like a flame thrower attack) if they are damaged with a certain amount of bludgeoning damage, and half as much magical bludgeoning damage. And those same mechanical monsters could be wholly immune to slashing damage and resistant to magical slashing damage. Make spirits immune or resistant to magical and non-magical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, but they are vulnerable to silver and radiant damage. Just some thoughts. One could maybe even make a book for it. The Advanced Guide to Monsters or something like that. use all the same monsters from the Monster Manual, but add these kinds of flavors to the monsters that you think need them.
I like how 3.5e handles this sort of thing for the most part. For one, rather than taking half damage to things they are resistant to, they have flat damage reduction. And while there are some monsters whose physical damage reduction is bypassed by a mere magic weapon, they aren't super common. Most monsters that have DR have more specific things that bypass it like certain damage types, i.e. a skeleton has DR bypassed by bludgeoning, and a zombie has DR bypassed by slashing. Then you get to things that have specific materials that bypass them (and it doesn't matter if a non silver weapon is magic, it won't bypass a Werewolf's damage reduction), or things that require a magic weapon with a specific damage type (i.e. magic bludgeoning weapons for a lich). Hell, there are even monsters whose damage reduction is bypassed by weapons with an alignment tied to it.
My preference is to change resistance and vulnerability to specific numerical additions or subtractions to the damage. It's how I run my current home games. Resist 5 fire, vulnerable 10 cold, resist 15 physical overcome by adamantine. Immunities are less common as well, instead replaced by high resistance numbers. Fire giants have resist 25 fire, not immunity. Low level monsters have low resistances and vulnerabilities, higher level monsters get higher resistances and vulnerabilities. I even keep resistances like the grik, but change it to resist 5 non-magical physical damage. Their skin is supernaturally tough, but doesn't resist magic. If one is killed and its hide collected in good shape, that actually sells for a lot of money because it's useful in a lot of situations as cut resistant leather. It's a specific monster that is better against certain weapons, the same way certain monsters are better against certain spellcasters with high saving throw bonuses and resistance to a bunch of elemental damages. A lot of other monsters are specifically overcome by certain weapon types, such as silver, cold iron, adamantine, and mithril. A magic weapon doesn't help against fey, but cold iron does. And I specifically make heavy use of these features, so that players are encouraged to explore around and have a variety of weapons for different circumstances. Damage reduction overcome by magic is less common than special weapon materials though. I do hope that they don't get rid of physical damage resistance in general. It's a way of requiring different thought against certain types of enemies, and creates situations where monsters are actually able to threaten large groups of low level guards. A lot of the mid to high level monsters in 5e without resistances or immunities can just be killed by a bunch of low level archers firing a few volleys of arrows. It weakens the need for specialized characters if even mid teen enemies are seriously threatened by a dozen mundane archers.
I love the idea of leaning more heavily on vulnerabilities to flesh out monster concepts that are meant to be generally tanky! I could also see a niche here in that sort of design philosophy for making bane weapons a more standard part of the magic item menu for DMs to introduce. There's some element of that in certain items (Dragon and Giant Slayer weapons, and Holy Avengers), but it used to be more of a stock magic item effect in older editions, and having a more general sort of "X-Bane" magic item that deals double damage to the specific creature type in question would fit well with a design philosophy that leans on "Vulnerability to X" rather than "Resistance to Nonmagical Weapons". It would open up *more* design space for those thematic unique creatures that can only be (reasonably) defeated by the legendary Sword of XYZ. For instance, I could easily see dragons in the Dragonlance setting having even higher HP than standard dragons, with the expectation that to beat them you'll need something like the eponymous dragonlances or a similar dragonbane weapon like the Wyrmslayer sword that Tanis Half-Elven receives from Kith-Kanan -- these weapons dealing not just a couple extra d6 damage (per existing rules for Dragon Slayer weapons in 5e), but *double* damage to dragons!
100% agreed about re-working the resistance or immunity to non-magical attacks , and plenty of other game mechanics options could offer more fun and effective options. in some cases, a damage threshold can work, like needing to cause 10, 20, or 30 hp of damage for a minimum threshold ... or the attacking creature needs a Proficiency Bonus of +3 or +4 to penetrate the resistance/immunity . . . and yes you make a good point to provide something else for characters to gain a feature instead of gaining magical attack. which appears to be on the horizon for OneD&D
The concept of magic weapons and damage resistance to non-magical attacks made a lot more sense in the content of 3rd Ed. The resistance scaled whereas in 5e it's a simple binary. That worked because getting more and more powerful magic items was built into 3E's character progression system. And was only necessary to progress but was also a big part of the motivation of dungeon delving in the first place. So when you came upon a tough for such as a boss monster you not only needed the power and skill to challenge them but also the proper equipment. This also had the effect of putting certain boss monsters past the level where they could be defeated by common mortals. So for example if a demon had "+3 or better weapon to be hit" and you were a low level adventurer you knew the only option was to RUN. Quite the opposite of 5E in many ways. And also probably led to less TPK's since this simple mechanic let people know when they were clearly outclassed. But 5E is also quite different in another more obvious way. And that is that there are far fewer magic weapons and those weapons mean less in game. They are nice to have but no longer required as part of progression. And thus how often a party can be expected to have them more difficult or impossible to predict. So all in all it makes resistance to non-magical weapons much more arbitrary. Especially when combined with random monsters like the grick that seem to get it out of nowhere. It's just one imbalancing factor on top of another on top of another.
I would LOVE to see more vulnerabilities in general and thematic resistances come in to play in DnD I think it would offer way more combat as well as role-playing depth It could also potentially help balance casters a small bit, but in a way that feels fun. They would be encouraged to keep multiple damage types on hand to take advantage of a vulnerabilities, with the trade off that that would eat Spell preparations. It also would make sense that Martials would have multiple weapons for certain situations. Like a Polearm is great on a battlefield, but less so in the tight confines of an alley. While not 100% the same, you could have a Fighter that generally uses a Halberd, but keeps a dagger or shortsword for situations where Piercing damage would be handy. Also weapons could have multiple damage types. In real life many weapons could be used multiple ways to deal with different targets (a poleax has bludgeoning elements for us against armor, and piercing elements for lighter targets), or can be used in alternative ways with certain techniques (Ex. The "murder stroke" technique where you grab the sword by the blade and use the pommel as an improvised bludgeon) Love this idea and this video!
A fix is having limited resource magic items a quiver that on a short or long rest adds magic to 10 of the arrows stored in it until the next rest or a magic sheathe that grants a sword stored in it for a long rest 10 charges that can be expended on a hit and last until the next long rest. These can be minor enchantments like making these attacks magical and adding 1d4 of an elemental damage type chosen when making the item. This way the martial has an option that is available to overcome the resistance but has to be careful not to user up this limited resource. And the item still has value even if they find a +1 weapon or fight no enemies with this resistance.
It's something I've considered on my AL paladin build. So I went with Devotion paladin so that I can get a magic weapon whenever needed. I have a magic weapon I could bring, but at my level, I'm limited to 3 magic items, and I prefer my cloak of displacement, ring of protection, and Opal of the Ild Rune
All monsters should have more vulnerabilities and resistances. Feels like resistances are pretty common but you almost never see vulnerabilities. Hurts the game and makes monsters feel less interactive and there's less to reward players with for playing more like a Witcher / proper monster hunter, preparing ahead of time and bringing the right gear for the job.
I think the problem with vulnerabilities would be that casters would be in the best position to exploit them, meaning that they'd get an even bigger edge on martial classes.
@@tibot4228 Casts wont be able to exploit Material Vulnerabilities. Silver weapons. Gold idols. Raw Iron bands. There's then also Scenario Vulnerabilities (Stake to the heart, Counting coins, salt barriers)
@@tibot4228 BPS is just another form of Elemental / Damage Vulnerability. I want to see a full incorporation of a broad scope of vulnerability types. Damage Vulnerabilities. Material Vulnerabilities. Scenario Vulnerabilities. Condition Vulnerabilities.
haha. only time resistance and immunity to non-magical weapon damage has ever been fun has been this one time I ran a alternate timeline campaign set in BBC's merlin universe, where a lot of monsters explicitly were immune to conventional weapons and merlin need to sneakily help out the knights for them to be able to kill the monsters. or they needed to use weapons forged in dragon's breath, which was their version of magical weapons. dnd 5e as a system oddly worked very very well for this setting, where we had the party pick magical classes that had to hide their magical nature in all their dealing with camelot. I was basically able to just pick random monsters from the monster manual and make the monsters of the week for the early part of the campaign, which sustained us for fun encounters until the party eventually gained enough connections and investment in camelot and the npc's of camelot to be driven towards larger goals, like convincing king arthur to accept magic.
I mean addressing a monster that you feel shouldn't have resistance to b/p/s is as simple as removing the resistance and doubling the average hp. Or just make sure your martials have magic weapons to begin with. Not all magic weapons have to be +1 or even provide a combat bonus, the moonlit sword is a magic weapon that exclusively generates light but would still bypass the resistance. If anything it's a reminder that you need to be giving your players magic gear.
For magic arrow: I would just change it to add if you are using a magic bow then the arrows are +1 arrows. But if it's a non magic bow then they just get treated as magic arrows with no bonus. I like the resistance to different damage types when it makes sense and agree vulnerabilities are way under utilized and I add vulnerabilities that make sense and remove resistances that don't. I also like that magic items overcome resistance/immunity to non magical attacks. It gives me the image of lord of the rings when Aragorn uses his sword against the deserters while all the other weapons were useless.
If they get rid of the non-magical damage resistance rule, then heavy armor mastery becomes an actually viable feat option since it can reliably reduce physical types of damage.
Resistance to non-magical weapon attacks is really good to challenge groups that are melee heavy and can give the casters a chance to shine. While I think that there may be too many lower level creatures that have this resistance, it is a great tool to be able to balance encounters for many groups, especially optimized ones. If you are running into a ton of creatures like this with no access to magic weapons, then your DM needs the feedback. My house rule would be to have the damage resistance to only apply on the first attack of each turn, so once the PC's get multiple attacks, this helps mitigate the damage reduction if the group doesn't have magic weapons yet.
I think the new model for creatures like werewolves is regeneration (stopped by silver), that's what the loup garou in VRGtR has. I feel to some degree that D&D is trying to gradually go back and pull the features from 4th edition that worked, while leaving behind the stuff that didn't. Once you rescale for bounded accuracy, 4th edition monsters work just fine in 5e.
I still play 5e. I enjoy playing 5e for the most part (I'm a forever dm). However this video kinda explains why I am playing 50% Pf2e. Pf2e fixes a lot of these issues because resistances and immunities on monsters are varied and come up a lot more often. And its never just double or half damage like 5e (usually has a number attached). It makes monsters more interesting and make players have to do some rolls to figure out these things and they are able to capitalize on the knowledge. As much as I have enjoyed 5e, PF2e has made running combat and monsters so much more fun and interesting. Most 5e monsters are either spellcasters with subpar spell lists or sacks of hit points with multi attack (and maybe resistance to non magical attacks but this video explains why that its bad). Overall great video and I still like the content, but the wishful hoping that OneDND is going to improve all our issues with 5e is just that, wishful thinking.
I have Spellforged Weapons in my campaign. They have an enduring enchantment, are sturdier than normal weapons, and harm creatures resistant to normal weaponry. This creates greater accesibility to reliable damage for martials at low level. Of course I have also been playing exclusively levels 10-20 for the past three years, so it's not really a problem anyway. In general, the only characters who sometimes have a problem causing full damage are Gunslingers and other firearm users. Those characters prioritize finding workarounds, so it's not much of an issue really. With all that said, I do like it when the vampire brushes the minimum damage arrow from his chest and only looks annoyed as much as I do when a character pulls out his warhammer against a group of skeletal enemies and goes to town. So I would like to see more thematic vulnerabilities and resistances, but I don't mind it when some monsters are merely annoyed by "the puny weapons of men". I also don't mind Immunity to certain damage types. Having an attack fail or underperform shouldn't create such despondency that the character just gives up. Switching tactics, using the environment, and teamwork can still win the day and allow a resourceful player to shine even brighter because they weren't just standing there chipping away. There are also monsters with elemental immunities/resistances and magic resistance. No one boo-hoo's for the spell casters when they have a hard time getting their magic to be effective, and the reason is that they are probably packing /something/ that will have an effect due to the high utility of magic in general (unless they are dedicated to some element thematically, and in that case they knew what they were getting themselves into). I think more varied resistances and vulnerabilities would allow weapons to represent some of the same utility magic offers, and I'm all for it. On a sidenote... if Celestials were vulnerable to Necrotic, and therefore Fiends were vulnerable to Radiant, that puts a vary specific emphasis on mankind's role in the battle between good and evil. ;-)
My recollection of the oldest editions was that it was much rarer to get these kinds of resistances, and it was mainly thematic (vampires, werewolves, demons etc). Even then, it was too easy to get around them with "magic" weapons .. and then they started with the "Oh, no, you need a +2 or better" for the "tougher" creatures and sure enough it all went to shit by the time we got "DR 30/byeshk" (you remember byeshk?)
Adding more vulnerabilities also makes combat more fun and interactive for players. Going into a fight, instead of it just being a slug feast, the players are communicating and going "did that fire bolt do more damage? okay, lets start hitting it with fire!". Or you have a situation where you know about the monster beforehand and the players can seek out information regarding vulnerabilities.
Something that I didn't hear in the video is that 3e did this, but the "golfbag" of equipment was considered a negative, which is why 3.5e moved to a "tiered" system, which "nonmagical bludgeoning, Piercing, or slashing" is a remnant of.
One fix to the Magic Arrow problem is to change the feat so you can choose your damage type, like the following feats you mentioned do. Or maybe on a rest you can choose a damage type and add 1d6 of that element on top of every attack you make until your next rest. If that's a bit OP you could give it limited charges, maybe corresponding to your proficiency bonus, or you could make it a d4. Idk, I'll let you number crunchers work out if that's a good idea or not, I just wanted to chip in with an idea.
For the part about house rules and the archer getting the useless feature, as the dm I'd bring it up to any effected players and allow them to replace it with a feat of equal/ greater power like the magic arrow can ignore full cover a # of times equal to your prof. Bonus or something.
I remember playing at 3.5 game and there was animated truck that I was able to damage because I was using a rape gear which don't piercing. Damage but others who were using slashing or blushing weapons work not harming this thing. I like that
Fantastic points and I 100% agree on all the major points (although I'd be careful about giving out too many vulnerabilities). I STOPPED giving monsters resistance to magical BPS damage it in my campaign. Particularly because I don't like giving out magical weapons early and this damage type unfairly punishes early game martial characters and has NO affect on monsters HP in the later stages of the game!
I completely agree with your points and the best solution is to fix Conjure Animals and Animate Objects. Those spells just make it more difficult for DMs, especially new ones, and bog down combat. Animate objects should just allow 1 Large, 2 Medium, 4 Small, or 2 swarms of Tiny objects with stats adjusted to be comparable to other 5th level spells. Conjure Animals just needs to remove the summon 8 creatures option.
Some notes I have with this: 1) I have been running PF2 and there are a lot of vulnerabilities. Many of the monsters which traditionally have resistances got HP bumps and vulnerabilities instead. 2) The rule makes a lot more sense when magic weapons are not readily available. I think one of the worst design changes into 5e was expecting people who have played from 3.0 onwards to not expect magic weapons to be so common that the party is tripping over the ones so obsolete they are just left on the ground.
The only reason I can think of why non-magical weapon damage exists on some monsters is to extend combats one the party gets to around levels 4-7, to balance (somewhat) against the Extra Attack feature that martial characters get in that zone.
I've had skeletons etc be completely immune to piercing damage. I imagine a rapier or arrow just bouncing in between the rib cage and doing nothing at all.
Makes sense. Either blunt weapons (like a hammer or club) and magic might work better on that enemy type. I learned a lot while playing Vagrant Story (PSx game from Sqaresoft).
I do three things. 1. Separate bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing into three separate categories. 2. Add Vulnerability (you're right, I have no idea why they don't use this) 3. Add a mechanic where particular single use items grants the weapon the ability to be "magical". Example for number 3, a werewolf is Vulnerable to Silver (in my game), instead of finding a silver dagger, you have a silver powder that you put on your weapon to make it affective for 5 rounds.
I had a long hiatus from TTRPG play and when I started with 5E was surprised there were no levels of immunity. In the earliest versions of DND some monsters were immune to anything below a +2 weapon. Others required a +3. It went up to iron golems and the strongest devils and demons, plus ancient dragons and divine avatars, immunity to any lesser weapon than +5. This might be going the wrong direction for those wanting to reduce the role of magic items in favour of personal abilities and super powers, but it would gate powerful monsters from low level characters without opening up the whole monster manual to anyone with a +1 dagger. It's also consistent with the video game logic of different metals doing more damage and affecting more powerful enemies, up to daedric metal and holy swords being required to damage the most powerful demons.
I've been thinking a lot about this in my rules rewrite. I'm considering developing a set of feats which specifically grant the character the ability to overcome piercing, slashing or bludgeoning resistance in addition to features which enhance one of those damage types in a similar manner to the bludgeoner piercer and slasher feats It'd basically be like a character is finding ways for those weapons to break through those defences. It may be a good way to remove the magical aspect of those resistances as then the agency is on the player, do they want to deliver consistent Bludgeoning damage or do they want to pick a different feat/ASI?
As written, Conjure Animals doesn't let the player choose what the animals are though. So while yes theoretically someone could summon all these velociraptors, in practice it really depends on how the table runs the spell.
There is a small error on the math with the Barbarian damage from potential bonus action attacks through great weapon master, nothing that changes the conclusions of the video, but just to let you know I'm aware of it.
Why I make it that piecing, slashing & bludgeoning resistance applies to casters as well if they don't have a +1 to 3 focus/staff et cetera.
It's not a perfect fix but certainly closes the gap of Martial & caster somewhat by limiting the spells a caster can use for most elemental damage spells are AOE & not single target.
I just don't tell the casters that this is the case & suggest to all using the 3 damage type that their attack seem to hurt it but not as much as it should!
This simple house rule solves the problem for the DM far more the bumping HP.
If the caster happened to pick a single target damage spell like say disintegrate or eldritch blast then good for them but most casters have no single damage target damage spells.
If they want to throw fireball or similar at a single target then let them & many creatures have resistance if not immunity to fire so the caster is not all save unless the picked wisely.
I reward players for thinking & making logical choices unlike most DM's!
The weapon damage die is 2d6, so any feature that grants additional weapon die to a critical hit should reflect that, meaning its another 2d6, not just another 1d6.
@@arnijulian6241 "Most casters have no single damage target damage spells." Just from cantrips alone, I have to disagree with this. The most common ones are going to be dealing energy damage types - cold (ray of frost), fire (firebolt), force (eldritch blast), lightning (shocking grasp), necrotic (toll the dead), psychic (vicious mockery), and radiant (sacred flame) damage, just for example.
There are relatively few spells that actually deal b/p/s damage. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rule you're using, but I don't see how imposing those resistances on spellcasting has any significant impact.
@@johnhodges2760 Ray of frost, toll of the dead, &shocking grasp at D8 to 4D8 are really not as great as people think.
What people forget about these cantrips is no stat or + from a weapon is added.
Shocking grasp is the worse of those you mentioned unless on a very select niece build as you have to enter melee/touch range of 5ft as caster.
You can make toll of the dead work but takes effort though not worth it in my opinion.
I mentioned 'Eldritch blast' but that is all the Warlock has going for it unless you realize the cantrip is a build trap.
Eldritch blast isn't free as it takes invocation or multiclassing levels of investment which isn't often worth with the paladin being an exception to warlock but try getting that build past a DM that thematical.
vicious mockery
is funny but an awful damage cantrip as D4 to 4D4 even with the disadvantage on attacks is pitiful.
A Tavern brawler grappler build using the shove action is so much more effective & a fun martial build I highly advise.
Firebolt is not as great as people think even if D10 to 4D10 as no stat+ unless evoker or arcane domain cleric for instance.
188monsters have resistance 137 immunity to fire
Non magical Bludgeoning, Slashing, Piercing 198 resistance 50 immunity.
If fire did not have utility it would be worse as so many creatures in 5E are outright immune to fire.
note:
Cold 238 resistance & 101 immunity.
Only damage worse then cold is poison
85 resistance & 531 immunity truly the worse damage type.
of the 10 damage types that are not Bludgeoning, piecing & slashing that if grouped together as 1 are ranked 7/11 without magic items just behind lightning & damage type.
With magic weapons said group excluding slashing ranks 4/11 in resistance /immunity.
Bludgeoning 36 resistance 1 immunity
22 vulnerabilities.
Magical Bludgeoning is great damage type of the used by melee.
Piercing 45 resistance 0 immunity
Slashing 26 resistance 9 immunity
Only greater damage types once magic weapons used in this order:
(3) Thunder 18 Resist 18 Immune 5 vulnerable
(2) Radiant 21R ,10 I &13 V
(1) Force 6 R, 4 I & 2 V
Few cantrips & spells have these 3 top tier damage types.
Note:
These resistance & immunity figures are for base 5e without expansion book but give a rough perspective.
Sacred flame 'The target gains no benefit from cover for this saving throw.' is it's real strength.
If it was not radiant it would not be 1/2 as good.
Mind this isn't for DPR but sniping from cover.
Not every cleric will do this or build for it.
Chill touch is not great for DPR but is excellent cantrip for 1 reason.
Target ''it can't regain hit points until the start of your next turn. Until then, the hand clings to the target.''
worse named cantrip in the game but is so very useful if you read through it.
Mind Sliver is excellent but not for damage but it targets intelligence save though only D6 to 4d6 the added benefit of '' subtract 1d4 from the next saving throw it makes before the end of your next turn''.
Mind sliver is for caster that want to make sure 1 time important single target effect spells land more consistently!
Few caster play this way though it is very nice.
Acid splash is simply awful even with good damage & type as it puts casters to close to melee.
You see damage cantrips are really not as great as you think.
My solution to non magical weapon resistance/immunity is not completely resolved but since the martial are not told & nor are casters directly told that make mistakes it tends to balance out better then might think.
Easiest way to close the martial caster gap some as a DM is give martial magic items like Javelin of Lightning for 1 time use range lightning.
+1 low level play & +2 mid level play armour goes a long way for martials if you keep +1 armour for caster to mid & +2 to high & +3 to late play.
DM's really should read magic items every time before giving them out planned ahead of time if at all.
I purposely put out less Items that would benefit a caster as they don't simply don't need it.
I tend to give 1 appropriate Magic item out for each plater character then 1 extra more powerful that could only benefit a martial but take great caution in handing out magic weapons, staff or anything that effects damage!
damage resistance has always been easy to deal with as a DM....
If your warrior cant afford a +1 weapon... have a mage cast light or fairy fire on it..... it sadly counts...
which is why I prefer 3.0e DR rules.
This 👍 "Vulnerability is a mechanic that is way underutilized in 5th edition"
I was a pokemon player before I was a dnd player. I was shocked by the lack of vulnerability in almost every creature
The hp pool isn't where it needs to be on monsters.
@@saeedrazavi4428Yup. I learned Pokemon's meta to help my son in a tournament years ago. Then when he got better we would each buy a version of the new games and Nuzlocke race each other. After all that time combing thru psypoke and serebii for type matchups, IV, and EV info, the 5e monster type stuff is kind of underwhelming.
You really should be giving martial characters a magical weapon along the way, for other reasons already. By the time this resistance is very common, you should be there. You give a few encounters in the transition period where they have to work around it. Yes there is some DM dependency here, but if you have. Dick DM that would constantly throw these fights at martials with no magical weapons, they would just be a dick otherways
I agree. I try to give monsters some type of vulnerability if it makes sense. Players enjoy figuring out and exploiting their opponents' weaknesses.
When I first started playing 5e a few years ago, the fighter in my party was using a war hammer at level one. Then we encountered some skeletons, and we learned that they are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage and only bludgeoning damage. He then picked up a long sword and a morning star, so he always had access to the three different weapon damage types, and went Battle Master subclass at level 3. We never encountered anything that his different weapons made any difference on again - because those monsters don't exist. It was a real let-down.
Exactly. Why they stopped at the skeleton is anyone's guess.
@@TreantmonksTemple because Wotc creators are lazy and cant figure things out. That is why there are these new editions, because nobody wants to do any math or figuring things out anymore like was the case in old school D&D. That is why new editions are nowhere near as good as other rpgs out there and older versions of D&D.
@@1asnyd yeah looking in the gurps rule book is like looking at a written masterpiece of flexibility mixed with clear guidelines if a character gets drunk I know he’s drunk if the character is under an illusion I know how that works and there’s no case where the system gives up and says “idk advantage” like with 5e that gave up half way designing combat and said advantage
It's more for the gm to keep track of though, so maybe they thought the benefit wasn't worth the additional mental burden? Not everyone is as experienced as I assume the present company is after all.
I do constructs the same as skeletons ..
Lycanthropes should have regeneration that is shut off by silver, not damage immunity.
That's how I've been ruling it
I can at least see where they are coming from with werewolf immunity. In some folklore they they could only be injured by silver bullets, so their immunity reflects that.
Some of that is just description. If you like the imagery of Werewolves healing any type of damage then you can still describe their bones shattering or an arrow piercing their eye and then it knitting back together before they take their action. Thr effect in game is the same, but it's a pretty cool reveal that their actions were fruitless.
In previous editions, they did. However that rule, along with many others, was deemed just one of the Many instances of 'too much book keeping' that apparently kept the bulk of the current player base out of the hobby.
In reality, you can always flavor their resistance as regeneration anyway. They don't "take less damage," instead the wound inflicted "suddenly heals shut" after they're struck by the wrong weapon type. Same mechanical outcome, but with different flavor.
Van Richten's Guide reprinted the wereravens who appeared in Curse of Strahd and made that exact change. To keep them from being too powerful, I would personally rule that critical hits would also shut off regeneration for a turn.
I would add another piece of evidence is that they removed the extra Divine Smite damage for fiends and undead. That makes sense if radiant vulnerability is more common for those monster types.
Maybe!
That could be cool, is a sea of vulnerabilities.
Significant thematic design flaw, otherwise
Huh, I didn't realize that until you said it had been removed.
I too have been wanting to see vulnerabilities added in the rules as written in 5E; It just makes sense in a lot of cases. Likely rarely played upon due to WotC's desire to homogenize everything. I use vulnerabilities in my games though because why wouldn't you use them?
That's what I thought. Maybe we will actually see a more useful and a more expanded resistance/vulnerability system. Then the options to change/choose damage types makes a lot more sense! Of course that would be good to know for playtest purposes...
Transitioning from 4E to 5E (I also played 3E), I was annoyed by the retrograde evolution in regard to resistances, and by the near non-presence of vulnerabilities. I definitely hope their philosophy has changed for OneD&D.
This is one of those things for which people always "helpfully" offer, "You can change it at your table." Yes, I can. That doesn't change the subliminal annoyance I've felt each of the hundreds (thousands?) of times it arises.
I'm pleased to see that I'm not alone. I don't recall anyone ever agreeing with this gripe of mine.
honestly we really at the point where we need that martials/weapons playtest to really understand what their goals are in 1D&D.
Like with unarmed strikes, there are very few ways to have those be magical but they clearly want the moon druid to be using them and giving the paladin the option as well.
That's the next one. Coming next month I believe.
That's the one that I've been looking forward to the most. How are they going to compensate for the loss of power attack mechanics? Are martials going to be buffed in relation to casters (who have been buffed themselves already)? Is monk not going to suck finally?
Isn't a punching paladin just... a monk? Lol
@@sandman6088 not really. They have better hit points and armor class, make less attacks, are half casters and their mobility depends on their steed.
I was always annoyed that as soon as you give a +1 weapon most monsters that have that resistance went down 1 CR at least.
One solution I might try pursuing is not make all +1 magical....it might be just from being of exceptional crafting quality or materials, and make a "+1 magical enhancement" something that a magic weapon CAN have, but isn't guaranteed
I mean to be fair I think a way better solution would be to like, include 2 different CRs for creature's like this.
@@socialjihad5724 making +1 non magical would penalize weapon users too much. You could turn immunities into resistances though.
@@socialjihad5724 But, why punish Martials when they're already weaker than casters?
@@mogalixir that could be said with all resistances though. while you can argue that in some ways casters can overcome the resistance by virtue of spell diversity, it's clear that the math for resistances weren't thought of with build viability in mind. you simply are not allowed to brute force any given creature with a resistance and you're expected to play around it, whether or not they designed your class or subclass to do so. previous editions, competitors, and 3rd party content all were able to overcome the problem.
there's flat resistances that allow glass canons or bruisers of a specific damage type to brute force it. there's not granting resistances to all three mundane damage types so the simple act of carrying a shortsword and hammer along with your longsword would feel useful to a martial. and there's designing consumables so that a bonus action can allow martials to apply magic damage to the weapon. putting a shred of thought in giving a mundane damage dealer solutions is really all they have to do. elemental bane exists for casters that want to lean on one specific element, so the way I see it, the problem at its core is that they're failing to put thoughts to giving players straightforward solutions to the challenges they create.
Summary of a Session 0 as we finished one campaign and started another:
DM: I am going to be giving out fewer magic items in this next campaign.
Player: I'm going to play an Artificer.
DM: Artificer? You mean that class in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything Optional?
@PDubb Yes true, however we had already worn him down to accepting Tasha's content. 😅
I specifically forbid two options from Tasha's in advance: Artificers and Twilight domain clerics. First one gets tons of magic items on top of regular class abilities, i.e. attacks and spellcasting, and the second one gives literal hundreds of temporary HP per day and 300 ft darkvision which is rediculous.
Player: I’m going to find a new DM
@@golmgolm Their magical items are their class abilities. Without them they lag quite a bit compared to any other class.
One of the things I learned the hard way as a DM is to just make sure martials aren't dealing with resistance to non-magical BPS. Like...hand out +0 common weapons like Moon Touched Sword if the party is about to face enemies with this kind of resistance.
Not just because of balance. Also because my martial heavy party would against some monsters just take twice as long, and frankly my players found it really unintuitive "why is the vampire spawn taking way more damage to kill than the dragon we killed?"
Pathfinder 2e literally does what you said with bone creatures having resistance to piercing and slashing but vulnerability to bludgeoning.
D&D 3.5e (and therefore PF1) also did much the same, except with DR instead of resistance
Alot of great fixes are pf2e.
We really just need a 5 edition version of the game and I'm good to go 😂.
That's what I was hoping black flag would be.
@@DeadpoolAli you can just....play pf2? It's a great game that solves a lot of the problems people have with 5e so why wait for a dnd game when pf2 is right there?
@@loganjblack Some of the other aspects of PF may not appeal to a DnD 5e player, even if one mechanic or several are done very well.
@@willchurch8376 yeah i get that but they said "a lot of great fixes", I can understand if you only like martials being fixed or saving throws being fixed or the 3 action system etc but if you like a lot of the changes then why not just play it? I guess there could be some major turnoff but it'd be wierd if that outweighed all the bits someone prefers over 5e.
One idea that I've personally been playing round with is, rather than a resistance to nonmagical weapon attacks, I give them a reduction to the damage the creature takes from weapon attacks instead, via a feature that the creature has. It's something that:
- makes creature design for player level easier (some creatures can be anywhere from cakewalks to impossible based solely on access to magic weapons)
- doesn't punish martials to an unfair degree (because a -1/-2/-3/whatever or -3 per hit will tend to only be a fraction of the damage they are capable of)
- puts some control on the fodder summons (because their damage per hit tends to be lower than a PC's)
- has precedent for PCs but doesn't come up as often for creatures for some reason (because Heavy Armor Master feat has been a thing since the PHB, and we KNOW it's effective for low-level parties, so why not low-level creatures)
- can serve as the middle between weapon damage resistance and weapon damage immunity, when applicable (sort of, since reduction happens before resistance, but it's something extra)
- can easily be justified on a creature-by creature basis (based on anatomy, magic, etc.)
It's not perfect, either, but it DOES address my own grievance as far as people taking magic weapons because they HAVE to, rather than because they WANT to. Which is to say, I want my players to have magic weapons because they think they're cool, not because they're necessary.
I want to toss an extra thing I'd like to see changed in addition to virtually everything this video mentions. We see this a lot in those damage resistance/immunity bit: "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical ***attacks***" I'd like to see that "Attack" part taken out or at least considered more. Its silly to me that you can be a Werewolf and a Giant can throw a Rock at you as an attack, and you are immune to that, yet if that same Giant drops a Rock on you making the Werewolf make a DEX save, they can actually take damage from that. Its real silly.
Some creatures like the Demon Lords have this text: " bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing that is nonmagical" which covers a much wider bases and is so rare in 5e and should have been used more.
One of the more interesting one's I've found are the "Sorrowsworns" they all have this in their resistances: "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing while in dim light or darkness" This should be used more, conditional unique situations where that resistance can apply. Shadow Dragons have something similar.
That's a good point! If you're resistant to bludgeoning damage, you should be resistant to any bludgeoning damage.
Yes! Conditional resistances! Give each monster a weakness that everyone can access!
Ive also played with way too many DMs who didnt really understand the difference between magical, and non magical. so when i would go out of my way to pick options that did magical damage, enemies where still resistant to all my attacks.
Ugh.
I had a dm say that an articifer infused item "isn't a real magic item"
I really appreciate your videos because you don't ever, if at all, stop at just explaining why something is bad, but you come up with a solution and even give some examples.
Criticism without suggestions for improvement is just complaining.
Cool ideas:
More unique resistances and vulnerabilities
Unique ways to remove monster resistances (ex. Undead that can only be hurt by the weapon that killed it, evil wizard that can only be hurt after a certain magical artifact has been destroyed)
Effects for different damage types (Or at least unique spell effects for spells of different damage types)
Magic weapons with more interesting damage types and effect
Chris, you are such an insightful game designer. I think the next thing WotC should actually do is hire you. Or better yet, you should be their independent third party consultant. Thank you for your work.
I like the sound of independent consultant WAY more than being hired as staff by WotC. I'm getting very used to being my own boss, and not sure I would like going back. Of course, WotC doesn't need to hire me at all for consulting, they can just watch my videos!
If a monster had vulnerability to silver, I think it would be neat if a fighter would need a silver weapon or silver arrowheads, but also the casters would also need to burn silver as part of their spell components (with a monetary value, so can't be bypassed with a focus).
It would lean into the flavor of learning a monster and preparing to fight them.
That's an interesting idea, I didn't consider spell components at all.
Dnd really needs different effects for the different damage types:
For example, for every cold damage, your speed is reduced 1 ft for the next round.
Poison damage is increased by 1 die when you are bloodied (less than half hp).
Etc.
Also, if we could have a reworked magic item system, à la 4e, where every magic weapon has a level, you could have stuff like a monster has Resistance to slashing Lv. 8 - and then you deal damage according to a function of Res. Level and Magic Weapon level.
For example, if I have a Lv 5 magic sword, my damage is reduced by 3 against a monster with Res 8.
I'm taking this. But I'm kind enough to leave a contribution or two before I go. I've got manners.
•Psychic damage over the target's passive Con breaks concentration and prevents concentration spells until the end of their next turn.
•Radiant damage is the same, but blinds.
Force damage over the target's passive Str will push them away said number of feet.
We can literally do this all day.
@Vyrelion So something similar to Temp Hp / AC against magic specifically. I'll be taking this too. How would you feel about abilities that can rend this resistance? I.e. reduce the level by a certain amount, and once it's reduced by say, more than 3/4, their magic res is gone.
@@gammagong9435 for Psychic i was thinking : add half the damage taken to the Con save dc for concentration.
You take 8 damage, it's a dc 14 con check. You take 18, it's a 19 DC.
@@gammagong9435 regarding Resistance and Magic weapons: i think if you go the easy route (reduce damage inflicted by the difference in lvl betweem Res and weapon), you can just have weapons that for example "every hit with this reduces resistances by 1 for 10 min", or "this weapon is considered 5 levels higher for the purpose of damaging constructs"
The way they handle vulnerabilities and resistances in PE2 is a lot more like what you are shooting for. It feels really good when my magus finds out that a monster is vulnerable to something and then queueing up that damage type for a spell strike. Especially if I can tack on some typed persistent damage.
Good video Chris. I feel like some of the assumptions and ideas the original 5e designers had regarding magical weapons have not played out exactly as envisioned. Glad we’re getting a chance at a revisit.
The problem with the vulnerability is that it makes the player do the same action over and over.
Whereas resistance invites you to think outside the box and do one of several different types of damage
That is true, but at the same time there is more than one way to skin a cat. In a vacuum, yes, simply hitting it with the same attack it is vulnerable to over and over is boring. In practice, you must consider environmental factors. For example, the party is fighting some giant beast that is vulnerable to, say, fire damage. Yes, you COULD just sit there and fire bolt it to death, or you could create a boulder trap, or any other number of possibilities. Also, attacking with a hammer may mean more than simply roll to hit over and over, since it seems they will be changing martials and weapons significantly in One D&D. We will just have to see.
Resistance is not the problem. One-trick pony enemy design is.
Restrict its damage vulnerability to attacks from a certain angle or position (eg, the underbelly of a creature being vulnerable to piercing); meanwhile, the creature has a special attack that it either only can or can more easily perform against creatures in extremely close ranges. Or make damaging the creature with its damage vulnerability give it an an attack and damage bonus each time, sending it into a frenzy. Or give the creatures stages or transformations, where each time it is subjected to a damage type or condition, it opens up an opportunity for something worse; crack open a shell with sufficient resisted piercing or bludgeoning damage to expose the soft tissue which has a lot of vulnerabilities, or give a tall creature a vulnerable mouth that can be pried open with a grapple if you can make the creature prone first.
Create tension in choosing to set up a vulnerability or in choosing to capitalize on it by pairing it with a heightened risk or trade-off.
The problem with D&D monster and game design is that it sucks. The damage system is overly simplified and non-dynamic.
[pathfinder 2e comment here]
i know people are gonna make tons of these but its true, they do use resistances and vulnerabilities pretty well
4e style resistances would greatly improve this scenario. They add a little bit of math, however
one of many things 4e did well that got tossed in 5e along with all of the things it did miserably, baby-with-the-bathwater style.
Blasphemy!!! never try to use anything from 4e
3.0e MM is what you want.
4e style resistances are 3e style resistances.
1e, 2e and 5e by and large treat resistance the same, if you use an attack that is resisted, you deal half damage.
3e/4e had resistance be an threshold that was resisted, typically 10/20/30, sometimes 5/15.
1e/2e mostly had +x or immune when it came to physical damages. 3e introduced +x or resist. 30/+3 instead of +3 weapon to hit. 3.5 changed it to 'magic' and 'epic', which ended up making it the same as 5e, either a really big pain in the ass or not even a considered factor. I think 4e removed it entirely from the game.
I think my preference would be to go back to something similar to 3.5 style resistance, but make it interact a little differently with magic weapons. Have each + of a weapon treat DR /magic as 5 less than the listed amount. So if you hit a dragon with DR 20/magic, it resists 15 damage from a +1 sword, and no damage from a +4 sword. Then make sure that only creatures that REALLY need to be resistant to non-magical weapons have any DR /magic in the first place. I much prefer a werewolf taking extra damage from silver weapons and not being able to heal the wounds than being immune to any non-silver weapon.
It was better in the earlier editions when you needed +1, +2 or +3 to hit certain monsters. Alot more variation and it was not unfair towards martial classes either as there were many monsters with magic resistance in percentage that could completely resist any magic. Again the over simplification causes issues that never existed before.
I didn't really like that either, though I had a bad experience with an archery character that did 0 damage on most hits
@@TreantmonksTemple Yeah I remeber our group once encountering a ju-ju zombie before any of us had obtained any magic weapons and at that level, maybe 2 or 3, the magic-user and cleric didn't have much to offer either. But then you flee, that is almost always an option. In 2e magic weapons played a way more significant role in the power up of characters which was fun in some ways and annoying in others.
There have always been bad DMs, and that's why a good DM is treasured.
@@ljmiller96 How is it related to bad DMs you mean?
@@jocke6703 My guess is that a poor DM might be the sort that under delivers the magic weapons required to hit certain monsters, and overuses those monsters, without providing any in-game solution to obtaining said weapons. And of course, if running away simply means getting hit on the way out without any real means of escaping, it becomes a choice between multiple un-fun options all of which end in defeat.
you become more and more a person i wish was at d&d's game design team! your ideas are so good, easy to implement and just interesting to play around! i wish for me, you and all of us d&d players that WOTC is seeing you and considering your ideas... keep up the amazing work!
I will try, thank you!
concur
Wow - how thoughtful, Chris. The only problem I see, is that so many of these problems are interrelated and tricky, that any redesign is going to need a re-cast conceptualization. I hope that we do see some of these "sensible" improvements you're suggesting, many of which hearken back to 3.0, but that changes made don't require everyone to have to scrap their old books. "Game enhancement" always carries that risk.
Each creature should have a Triangle of resistance, Vulnerability, and normal in terms of the three weapon damage and/or melee vs ranged; Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing. And sprinkle in some immunities where applicable. I love games where ranged attacks are effective against flying creatures. It just makes sense.
Armors should have a take on the triangle of weaknesses, like plate resist slash, pierce is normal, vulnerable to bludgeoning. Whereas chainmail resist slash, normal bludgeoning, weak to piercing.
Definitely not a fan of the random resistances to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing and would be happy to see it go. I absolutely agree that I would love a revamped vulnerability and resistance system that more creatures engaged with that makes damage type matter more. Like how skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning, I think that’s awesome. I even think they should resist piercing. Figuring those things out could be a lot of fun.
On another note, my solution in 5e has been to just hand out +0 magical weapons to all martials at around level 5. Then spells are still limited but martials don’t suffer.
It's a reasonable solution, though it has the same problem as my house rule.
Never really thought about it until this moment but I think you are right. As a DM I dont enjoy balancing around it and carefully picking monsters to avoid confronting players with this too much or too early. I would actually like to see this done away in 6th edition.
My dm has already started requiring Adamantine and Silver. We’re going to go more into it next campaign more with Spelljammer. But he started realizing it as an issue 2 years into running our DoTMM. About the 14th level with crystal golems I believe. (We’re now on the 19th level. Started the game November 2020)
Your suggestion of using vulnerabilities more is exactly what we came up with to fix it when him and I talked in PMs in discord. With Spelljammer the magical weapons would be common of just having different damage types without any bonuses making them readily available.
I think another benefit is diversifying combat. Imagine using the observant and other similar feats that now grant bonus action searches. You could use that to discover what a creature is vulnerable/resistant to. Makes those feats worth taking for combat
You know I think this is something many of us just didn’t think about in a judgement way! I’m glad we’re discussing it now, before the (hopefully) end.
This definitely attributes to the major problem that is CR. If they keep this mechanic around, they should almost add rules about adjusting CR if your martial characters possess magical weapons or not. That grick may be CR2 if 50% of the party does half damage, but only CR1 if they have the tools to overcome it. I know that there is more to CR than HP and Resistances, but if it looked something like CR2(1) so that proficiencies weren’t altered, or there was just a table for adjusting.
Yes! I love damage vulnerabilities. I played with a dm who would always give foes at least one if it made sense and it was always a lot of fun poking and prodding for weaknesses till I found one I could exploit
I got to customize my Hexblade’s pact weapon a bit, and one of the properties I created was “Eldritch Alloy”. Basically, with enough of a special metal and a ritual, the sword can absorb the properties of that metal, which it can later reproduce. The sample metal has to be about twice the volume of the sword, and afterwards it crumbles to dust.
The sword houses the patron so while she started as regular steel, she’s been upgraded quite a lot by now. She’s absorbed silver to combat undead and lycanthropes, she can copy cold iron for fey, she can shift to adamantine for constructs and door-breaking, and she’s light to carry because of mithral. I’ve even had her absorb some strongly magnetized iron so she can sense direction. The DM has enjoyed having Gwenwyn-Llyn-Du (I often use Welsh for Elvish) as a mouthpiece in the party that’s not a DMPC. It’s more flavor than necessary mechanics, but I like the idea of the different metallic properties mattering.
I'm curious about what your opinion of a numerical resistance is. For example, removing the first few points of damage to each attack coming in, rather than halving the damage. This could even out the damages between a great weapon wielded by a barbarian and multiple summoned creatures.
Maybe, but IMO its just a side grade. Half is easy, and multiple creatures is a problem for more reasons than just power level. Resistance doesn't seem like a way to balance them at all imo, I think the should just be fair or more likely not exist in the 16 animals space.
I 100% agree. The crazy thing to me is that all the necessary factors for a Pokemon level type chart exist, but aren't used. Fiends could be vulnerable to radiant damage and resistant to fire. Humanoids could be vulnerable to poison or fire damage. Constructs could be vulnerable to lightning damage. Undead are vulnerable to fire and radiant. Elementals could be vulnerable to thunder damage, as it dissipates their form. And then allow exceptions based on the individual creature. Some elementals could be not vulnerable to thunder, but it would be an exception, for example.
In fact, we have more opportunities in D&D for interesting resistance/vulnerability combos than Pokemon. Make every creature with an INT of less than 5 vulnerable or resistant to psychic damage, and make every creature with more than 22 INT the other way.
Instead we get virtually no vulnerabilities, lots of resistances, and one method to substantially counteract resistances (magic weapons) which functionally makes it all moot. At least give us something to do with these mechanics, WOTC, even if you don't want to standardize creature types.
I agree Chris! Monsters like Specters having resistance to normal weapons makes some sense. But, a Grick? What?!? Needing a silvered weapon for optimization against werewolves needs to be there, but completely immune to a sword that could maybe lop an arm off? Also, RAW any lycanthrope could fall from a cliff and take the max amount of fall damage and just get up, brush off and walk away. Even vampires having resistance to non magical damage is arguable.
On the flip side, I think ghosts should have IMMUNITY to non-magical bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage. It makes no sense to me that an ordinary sword or arrow would harm an incorporeal spirit. I might even give the ghost RESISTANCE to MAGICAL b/p/s damage.
In early editions of D&D, 1st edition through 3rd edition had creatures with resistance or immunity to non-magical weapons that could actually be resistant to magical weapons as well up to a certain modifier. So some were vulnerable to just any magical weapon, some had to be hit by a +1 weapon, or +2, +3, etc. up to some of the demon princes that required a +6 weapon to penetrate its damage reduction. It handled this problem great. And with 5e only have magical bonuses up to +3, that just means scaling the resistance down, so maybe demon princes and solars would maintain resistance to weapons of +2 enchantment but not +3, lesser demons and devils would have less resistance. And this also brings back the idea of cold iron or silver or wood or whatever material a particular creature is vulnerable to also penetrating the resistance without having to be enchanted at all.
the way i see it, needing a magic weapon is code words for "you better be an adventurer". every adventurer should have magic at their disposal, and older editions were based around this. in 5th edition, less importance was placed on magic items, which threw off the balance. i wish magic item crafting was more in depth, magic items had a gold cost associated with them, and players had more agency in determining their character outside of class features. on the flip side, i wish magic casters had a little bit more need for keeping their spells in check; it becomes kinda boring after a while if you face no resistance. though i guess magic users have to deal with resistance types more frequently. it'd be cool if resistance wasn't just a flat half damage, and vulnerabilities came back. i seem to remember damage ranks being a thing, but i guess that was thrown out the window for simplicity's sake.
Actually, a Moonblade (a weapon that glows weakly) is a magic weapon and avoids all these issues.
Yep, I brought up that example in the video and point out an issue it creates...
Ops, I missed that or I would not have pointed it out. * Blushes *
When a common magic item, something you could easily find in any town, circumvents an entire game mechanic, the item is either overpowered, or the mechanic is poorly considered. I challenge you to find anyone that thinks a Moon-Touched Sword is an OP item. It is definitely part of a problem in D&D, where 90% of the special weapons are swords by default and push everyone into using the same weapon, because you know that unless the DM is consciously correcting the game's bias, all the loot will be swords.
Yeah if I had the option to take a +1 weapon over a weapon that glows dimly but does nothing else the obvious choice is the +1 weapon. That being said a glowing weapon is better than a normal weapon. It seems like a dumb oversight that "magic weapons" exist that give bonuses to hit but do nothing else, but a moon touched sword which does nothing at all except glow both are categorically "magic weapons" and thus overcome non-magic resistances when all the sword does is glow.
@@snazzyfeathers In earlier editions, higher level monsters would require higher bonuses on weapons to overcome their resistances, so for example, a low tier monster might require any magic weapon to overcome its damage resistance, but a higher tier monster would need a minimum +2 weapon
100% agree.
I've personally wanted to make a homebrew rule to add more vulnerabilities to creatures by type, and part of the issue I ran into was I think resistance and vulnerability kinda need rebalancing themselves too. Double damage is a lot, so it makes a bit more sense why creatures are rarely ever vulnerable to anything and have the hp for it to matter. half the vulnerabilities in the monster manual are mephits with like 7 hp each for example.
This game doesn't need to be pokemon, but I wish it were more like pokemon than it is currently. the lore ecology and blatant signifiers don't currently mean anything, and they should.
This is a pretty expansive thing too, when I was making homebrew for vulnerability by creature type some of my thoughts were the opposite for some creatures. For example oozes, in my mind they generally have a sort of liquid body, so most damage types don't make much sense. To me, extreme temperatures, lightning (I assume theyre controlled by electrical signals) and magical force to attack their more magical nature make the most sense. But when I look at monster manual entries for the oozes, several are resistant or immune to fire or cold damage, as well as random immunities to lightning damage.
So I feel like design wise it would be pertinent to have some general themes for what creature types could be weaker or stronger against certain damage types, although there can always be exceptions to that rule. Overall I'd like a large redesign of the mechanic that fosters more adventurous thinking and less necessary calculations like fire and poison being useless types and force and radiant being incredible.
what I would like to see is weapons having different damage/hit characteristics for example: longsword: 1d8 slashing/1d8 piercing/ 1d4 bludgeoning; sabre: 1d10 slahing/1d5 piercing/ 1d4 bludgeoning; warhammer: 0 slashing/ 1d10 piercing/ 1d10 bludgeoning
I would also like to see the same idea for armor, giving ac against damage types.
Recently I've started playing around with damage types in my game, in order to address this very issue.
I started to change enemies with this resistance in my game to just have resistance to physical damage, but vulnerability to something weird that isn't an actual damage type.
For instance, the latest enemie was a creature, basically made of water. So I gave it vulnerability to salt and dehydrating effects. If the fighter takes some salt from their cook's utensils and rubs it on their axe, that counts as salt damage.
A vampire could have vulnerability to wooden piercing damage, an iron golem might have vulnerability to the tools of a forge, a ghost might have vulnerability to incense, etc. There are tons of things you could get creative with.
I haven't had many opportunities to try this out just yet, but so far my players were big fans.
I hope they redesign the Classes in OneDnD with eye towards creating a consistent player experience. For certain classes to either suck or be great depending entirely on whether your DM gives out +1 weapons or whether your party takes Short Rests results in such a frustrating experience across the player base.
I think this is less a monster problem and more a magic item problem. if I got my way, gold would be correlated to HP and you'd have very clear guidelines on what magic items you can/should buy at which levels. When is the right time for martials to get a +1 weapon? What about casters getting that expensive component? How many spell scrolls should a wizard find?
This would make it even possible for CR to acount for magic items, which it doesn't except for one horrible way: including resistances and immunities into the calculations, meaning that the party having magic weapons makes CR even more unreliable.
Furthermore, you could make tools valuable by giving players the opportunity to craft certain magic items, meaning that their cost goes down and they can buy more stuff. This would make tool proficiency somewhat useful as opposed to something you can give 7 of because it doesn't matter either way.
You could also involve players in the process by giving them the chance to request items that follow the guidelines and that they0ll get upon leveling up... we can dream.
I really hope they are thinking along the same lines as you are. It's actually the same as I've been thinking as well, although you've said it much more eloquently than I could have. And I especially echo what you said on Vulnerabilities. There should be WAY MORE vulnerabilities.
Vulnerabilities would give monsters way more character.
I really hope they add more vulnerabilities to the game! It always feels better from a players perspective to do extra damage by changing your damage type (especially if you have a choice of damage type) then just to avoid halving your damage.
EDIT: wow youtube edited out some of my writing here! It took out my examples...!
Yes, I pretty much agree, things need to be re-done. I re-did all monsters back in the day, just as you explained at the end of the video...I remove things that make no sense, and add vulnerabilities...you know, water vulnerability to things that are on fire!
Think of it this way, most players will not know these stats, but when they figure it out, it is such a massive boon for them in future encounters. We need D&D to fix these things like you have mentioned, because let's face it, not everyone has the time or patients to homebrew everything.
Like not having magic items as a catch all. In Zelda games, Link uses a magic sword 90% of the time but final battle against Ganon requires Silver arrows, you cannot win the game with just a sword
I really hope that the game does away with resistance to non-magical weapons. Sure, I understand some of the lore reasons that it could be interesting; something that is just so powerful that you need magic to defeat it! But mechanically, it feels like it's more of a punishment for weapon users. It's not up to them when they can get a magic weapon, it's up to the DM. It is also up to the DM to present enemies resistant or immune to non-magic weapons. And ultimately, that punishment is not fun for the players who chose to use weapons instead of cast spells. I felt that pain as a rogue, when our party faced some vampire spawn, and what should have been a really strong Sneak Attack damage was halved because my bow and arrows weren't magic, and our wizard was out there putting me to shame. I felt useless the whole fight.
I'm so glad that I came across this, because this just confirms that my idea of giving vulnerabilities and various resistances is not a bad idea. Ever since the D&D drama, I had been pushing to polish off my own tabletop system and I wanted to utilize those resistances/immunities/vulnerabilities, because it reminds me of monsters from the Witcher. The idea of having monsters that will have specific weaknesses, and potentially some non-magical means (such as certain herbs or actions that can be taken) that are capable of hindering or weakening the monster. The idea was just to promote a sort of puzzle-like encounter. the fight is easier if you know what you're fighting. but if you don't know. then you're going to have a much harder time.
I hoped to make the system at least kind of compatible with 5e but have some extra depth/crunch that can help promote some build variety.. and also help even out the disparity between martials and spellcasters. The main goal is to kinda take a page out of Pathfinder 2e's book, and give more free-form features that can be chosen. I'm really hoping I can get enough of this system polished off to the point that I can release a sort of playtest/beta version of this game. simplified, only a few levels.. just to gauge reactions to it. I have no idea where I would release that kind of playtest for people.. Idk how well it will work, or even if it succeeds; but I do hope that if its a system that even a handful of people end up liking. I'll count that as a win.
Personally i just dont think immunity to piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning should exist at all. Its basically just saying "You dont get to participate in this fight" to martials.
The problem with Vulnerability is that double damage is too strong. DnD needs pathfinders Weakness system where rather than just doubling the damage, it lists a value and every time that creature takes that kind of damage, it takes more damage equal to the weakness value. So for example, lets say we have a Treant with "Weakness 5 to Fire damage." Everytime it takes fire damage, you add 5 extra damage to the damage dealt. That way, you can make it much more frequent and it allows you a variability in just how weak something is to a kind of damage. So Vampires can have weakness 20 to Sunlight, Trolls weakness 10 to fire, etc. It's just more elegant.
It's easy enough to add that ability to the creature's sheet. Granted, the DM shouldn't have to do it. This should've been part of the game system. They just tried to make the game as quick and easy to play as possible and some things got missed.
Magic arrow idea to replace Magical damage: Grant proficiency bonus to damage and/or grant infinite ammunition.
@Treantmonk's Temple There are a few house rules you could do for the Magic Arrow feature at level 7. One is make it so the arrow is conjured as you shoot (you choose the flavor), so no more ammunition requirement. If you don't track ammunition to begin with, then you can make it so the entire bow is conjured when you make a shooting motion. Sure, it's still outdone once you get a magic bow, but you'll never be without a weapon if you find yourself separated from that bow. That's great for a fighter.
Another option could be that when you make the arrow magical (whether you're imbuing regular ammunition or conjuring an arrow as per above), the arrow itself becomes +1 and gets added to the attack/damage separately from any bow modifiers. Have a regular bow? It's now functionally a +1 weapon. Have a +1 bow already? It's now effectively a +2.
In my game, I've added mundane weapons with extra benefits along with consumable weapon greases (taken from Elden Ring) to convert the damage type to give martial classes extra options. Also I've had the same idea with my custom monsters as you did in the video, such as stone golems resistant to slashing, piercing, fire, and necrotic but vulnerable to blunt and thunder/sonic. Tying into the new weapons, a new anti-armor weapon gives a higher chance to hit and bypasses the golem's slashing and piercing resistances.
I really like your idea about creatures having a resistance to piercing but not slashing, etc. When I first started playing, one of the first creatures we ever encountered was a skeleton, which took double damage from bludgeoning, and I was excited about the idea that choosing the right weapon could help you in a fight .... only to realize the skeleton is one of the very few monsters that actually uses this idea creatively, and most of them just have that repeated resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. I would love if more monsters took advantage of this mechanic! Plus, you're totally right that it would create incentives to carry a few weapons to suit different situations, especially for a Fighter or Barbarian, whose class makes them an expert in using many types of weapon, but right now there's not much incentive to do anything besides focus on one weapon that you've chosen the right feats for. Maybe you could still specialize in your main greatsword, but carry a mace or rapier to use when the right situation comes up, and this would be an advantage for martial classes, as opposed to casters and simple weapon classes who have fewer weapon options.
They really say screw the martials here's damage resistance and immunity vs them, but so far as I'm aware there are no monsters that require you to hit them with mundane damage. Because oh no what is the wizard gonna do if his spells have no effect? We can't have a player not making an impact on the combat! Nono, ignore that we do it to the martials >:-(
The problem with vulnerabilities is that they are too impactful. I mean, if you do 30 fire damage to a tree (which is not hard to achieve with fireball etc.), it becomes 60 (so 30 damage difference). So vulnerabilities are the opposite of imunities. This makes sense here and there, but on a horse against which a spear might be slightly more effective than a hammer, a vulnerability would be far too much. The same is true for player characters (a skeleton race with vulnerability to bludgeoning damage would suffer a lot, I think).
Therefore my idea would be to introduce an upper limit. So the skeletal Naga is weak against bludgeoning damage up to 20 damage. Meaning you do 10 damage, do 20. you do 30 damage, do 50. you do 70 damage, do 90.
I made a lot of homebrew changes because my group are a bunch of min/maxers so it is in our DNA to abuse everything. We eventually moved out of D&D and made our own systems due to that, it was easier than fixing D&D problems and we could steal good ideas from a wide variety of different systems and modify them for our own amusement without having to worry about copyright or other legal issues as we never published those systems.
What I did in my homebrew was have very limited immunity, things like a fire elemental were immune to any fire attacks, we relied on a modified resistance/penetration system. I had resistances being more common and at various CR thresholds everything hit basic physical damage resistances.
I changed resistance from 50% to -1 damage on each die roll of that element for each tier of resistance and higher CR npcs with resistance had higher tiers. Magic weapons of that element penetrated a tier of resistance for each plus it had, so a +3 magic weapon that did piercing would ignore up to T3 piercing resistance, but would suffer -1 on T4, -2 on T5, etc. This was our resistance/penetration system and it applied to every dice roll, so if something had T3 piercing resistance any 1-3s on a D6 would be counted as zeros and you would only get bonuses added to those rolls. It sounds convoluted but it played really well once people get used to it, it is a bit like shooting a rifle at a tank, a big enough hit will damage it but smaller arms fire wont. It made attacks or spells that used higher damage dice feel more potent but sometimes we had to modify things on the fly if something felt too powerful for it's CR.
I didn't mind people using animate weapon or other summons to help counter encounters with a lot of combatants. As a DM I don't really want to get bogged down with having to deal with the Cutlery Wizard or the Jurassic Park Druid to take down high CR mobs through cheese. It is just too much number crunching, I don't think it adds anything to the game to get bogged down with excessive dice rolling and tracking all their hp, movement, etc. So we just changed those two spells, I am okay with 1, 2 or 3 more significant summons, D&D is cumbersome with large numbers of combatants and I tried to avoid it by having higher challenge, lower number encounters as much as humanly possible.
I've added various resistances and vulnerabilities to monsters, which makes combats more interesting for my players! I've tried both the standard vulnerability (double damage) and "if you deal bludgeoning damage, deal 5 extra damage" or some other number which feels good.
For a second I thought “crossing my fingers, and crossing my toes” was going to be a new end of video rhyme setup
With One D&D, it probably could be...
I think they could allow specific damage types to be dealt to a creature causing a feature to be unavailable for a round (like a troll taking fire damage stops it from regenerating for that round) far more often. For instance, if you hit that Bone Naga with non-magical bludgeoning damage, they lose half their speed for their next turn. Maybe you could even have magical bludgeoning damage make them instantly fall prone if it reaches a certain threshold? That would add a reason to have magical damage for your attacks, but wouldn't make the person with a normal maul feel left out.
I might add that feature to bone monsters in general, just make the thresholds different for each monster. I could add a feature for mechanical monsters that they lose access to a feature (like a flame thrower attack) if they are damaged with a certain amount of bludgeoning damage, and half as much magical bludgeoning damage. And those same mechanical monsters could be wholly immune to slashing damage and resistant to magical slashing damage. Make spirits immune or resistant to magical and non-magical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, but they are vulnerable to silver and radiant damage.
Just some thoughts. One could maybe even make a book for it. The Advanced Guide to Monsters or something like that. use all the same monsters from the Monster Manual, but add these kinds of flavors to the monsters that you think need them.
I like how 3.5e handles this sort of thing for the most part. For one, rather than taking half damage to things they are resistant to, they have flat damage reduction. And while there are some monsters whose physical damage reduction is bypassed by a mere magic weapon, they aren't super common. Most monsters that have DR have more specific things that bypass it like certain damage types, i.e. a skeleton has DR bypassed by bludgeoning, and a zombie has DR bypassed by slashing. Then you get to things that have specific materials that bypass them (and it doesn't matter if a non silver weapon is magic, it won't bypass a Werewolf's damage reduction), or things that require a magic weapon with a specific damage type (i.e. magic bludgeoning weapons for a lich). Hell, there are even monsters whose damage reduction is bypassed by weapons with an alignment tied to it.
My preference is to change resistance and vulnerability to specific numerical additions or subtractions to the damage. It's how I run my current home games. Resist 5 fire, vulnerable 10 cold, resist 15 physical overcome by adamantine. Immunities are less common as well, instead replaced by high resistance numbers. Fire giants have resist 25 fire, not immunity. Low level monsters have low resistances and vulnerabilities, higher level monsters get higher resistances and vulnerabilities. I even keep resistances like the grik, but change it to resist 5 non-magical physical damage. Their skin is supernaturally tough, but doesn't resist magic. If one is killed and its hide collected in good shape, that actually sells for a lot of money because it's useful in a lot of situations as cut resistant leather. It's a specific monster that is better against certain weapons, the same way certain monsters are better against certain spellcasters with high saving throw bonuses and resistance to a bunch of elemental damages.
A lot of other monsters are specifically overcome by certain weapon types, such as silver, cold iron, adamantine, and mithril. A magic weapon doesn't help against fey, but cold iron does. And I specifically make heavy use of these features, so that players are encouraged to explore around and have a variety of weapons for different circumstances. Damage reduction overcome by magic is less common than special weapon materials though.
I do hope that they don't get rid of physical damage resistance in general. It's a way of requiring different thought against certain types of enemies, and creates situations where monsters are actually able to threaten large groups of low level guards. A lot of the mid to high level monsters in 5e without resistances or immunities can just be killed by a bunch of low level archers firing a few volleys of arrows. It weakens the need for specialized characters if even mid teen enemies are seriously threatened by a dozen mundane archers.
I love the idea of leaning more heavily on vulnerabilities to flesh out monster concepts that are meant to be generally tanky! I could also see a niche here in that sort of design philosophy for making bane weapons a more standard part of the magic item menu for DMs to introduce. There's some element of that in certain items (Dragon and Giant Slayer weapons, and Holy Avengers), but it used to be more of a stock magic item effect in older editions, and having a more general sort of "X-Bane" magic item that deals double damage to the specific creature type in question would fit well with a design philosophy that leans on "Vulnerability to X" rather than "Resistance to Nonmagical Weapons". It would open up *more* design space for those thematic unique creatures that can only be (reasonably) defeated by the legendary Sword of XYZ. For instance, I could easily see dragons in the Dragonlance setting having even higher HP than standard dragons, with the expectation that to beat them you'll need something like the eponymous dragonlances or a similar dragonbane weapon like the Wyrmslayer sword that Tanis Half-Elven receives from Kith-Kanan -- these weapons dealing not just a couple extra d6 damage (per existing rules for Dragon Slayer weapons in 5e), but *double* damage to dragons!
100% agreed about re-working the resistance or immunity to non-magical attacks , and plenty of other game mechanics options could offer more fun and effective options. in some cases, a damage threshold can work, like needing to cause 10, 20, or 30 hp of damage for a minimum threshold ... or the attacking creature needs a Proficiency Bonus of +3 or +4 to penetrate the resistance/immunity . . . and yes you make a good point to provide something else for characters to gain a feature instead of gaining magical attack. which appears to be on the horizon for OneD&D
The concept of magic weapons and damage resistance to non-magical attacks made a lot more sense in the content of 3rd Ed. The resistance scaled whereas in 5e it's a simple binary. That worked because getting more and more powerful magic items was built into 3E's character progression system. And was only necessary to progress but was also a big part of the motivation of dungeon delving in the first place. So when you came upon a tough for such as a boss monster you not only needed the power and skill to challenge them but also the proper equipment. This also had the effect of putting certain boss monsters past the level where they could be defeated by common mortals. So for example if a demon had "+3 or better weapon to be hit" and you were a low level adventurer you knew the only option was to RUN. Quite the opposite of 5E in many ways. And also probably led to less TPK's since this simple mechanic let people know when they were clearly outclassed.
But 5E is also quite different in another more obvious way. And that is that there are far fewer magic weapons and those weapons mean less in game. They are nice to have but no longer required as part of progression. And thus how often a party can be expected to have them more difficult or impossible to predict. So all in all it makes resistance to non-magical weapons much more arbitrary. Especially when combined with random monsters like the grick that seem to get it out of nowhere. It's just one imbalancing factor on top of another on top of another.
I would LOVE to see more vulnerabilities in general and thematic resistances come in to play in DnD
I think it would offer way more combat as well as role-playing depth
It could also potentially help balance casters a small bit, but in a way that feels fun. They would be encouraged to keep multiple damage types on hand to take advantage of a vulnerabilities, with the trade off that that would eat Spell preparations.
It also would make sense that Martials would have multiple weapons for certain situations. Like a Polearm is great on a battlefield, but less so in the tight confines of an alley. While not 100% the same, you could have a Fighter that generally uses a Halberd, but keeps a dagger or shortsword for situations where Piercing damage would be handy.
Also weapons could have multiple damage types. In real life many weapons could be used multiple ways to deal with different targets (a poleax has bludgeoning elements for us against armor, and piercing elements for lighter targets), or can be used in alternative ways with certain techniques (Ex. The "murder stroke" technique where you grab the sword by the blade and use the pommel as an improvised bludgeon)
Love this idea and this video!
A fix is having limited resource magic items a quiver that on a short or long rest adds magic to 10 of the arrows stored in it until the next rest or a magic sheathe that grants a sword stored in it for a long rest 10 charges that can be expended on a hit and last until the next long rest. These can be minor enchantments like making these attacks magical and adding 1d4 of an elemental damage type chosen when making the item. This way the martial has an option that is available to overcome the resistance but has to be careful not to user up this limited resource. And the item still has value even if they find a +1 weapon or fight no enemies with this resistance.
It's something I've considered on my AL paladin build. So I went with Devotion paladin so that I can get a magic weapon whenever needed.
I have a magic weapon I could bring, but at my level, I'm limited to 3 magic items, and I prefer my cloak of displacement, ring of protection, and Opal of the Ild Rune
All monsters should have more vulnerabilities and resistances.
Feels like resistances are pretty common but you almost never see vulnerabilities.
Hurts the game and makes monsters feel less interactive and there's less to reward players with for playing more like a Witcher / proper monster hunter, preparing ahead of time and bringing the right gear for the job.
I think the problem with vulnerabilities would be that casters would be in the best position to exploit them, meaning that they'd get an even bigger edge on martial classes.
@@tibot4228 Casts wont be able to exploit Material Vulnerabilities. Silver weapons. Gold idols. Raw Iron bands.
There's then also Scenario Vulnerabilities (Stake to the heart, Counting coins, salt barriers)
@@asitallfallsdown5914 Oh, if you meant B/P/S vulnerability, then you're right! I was thinking about all other damage types.
@@tibot4228 BPS is just another form of Elemental / Damage Vulnerability. I want to see a full incorporation of a broad scope of vulnerability types.
Damage Vulnerabilities.
Material Vulnerabilities.
Scenario Vulnerabilities.
Condition Vulnerabilities.
haha. only time resistance and immunity to non-magical weapon damage has ever been fun has been this one time I ran a alternate timeline campaign set in BBC's merlin universe, where a lot of monsters explicitly were immune to conventional weapons and merlin need to sneakily help out the knights for them to be able to kill the monsters. or they needed to use weapons forged in dragon's breath, which was their version of magical weapons.
dnd 5e as a system oddly worked very very well for this setting, where we had the party pick magical classes that had to hide their magical nature in all their dealing with camelot. I was basically able to just pick random monsters from the monster manual and make the monsters of the week for the early part of the campaign, which sustained us for fun encounters until the party eventually gained enough connections and investment in camelot and the npc's of camelot to be driven towards larger goals, like convincing king arthur to accept magic.
I mean addressing a monster that you feel shouldn't have resistance to b/p/s is as simple as removing the resistance and doubling the average hp. Or just make sure your martials have magic weapons to begin with. Not all magic weapons have to be +1 or even provide a combat bonus, the moonlit sword is a magic weapon that exclusively generates light but would still bypass the resistance. If anything it's a reminder that you need to be giving your players magic gear.
For magic arrow: I would just change it to add if you are using a magic bow then the arrows are +1 arrows. But if it's a non magic bow then they just get treated as magic arrows with no bonus.
I like the resistance to different damage types when it makes sense and agree vulnerabilities are way under utilized and I add vulnerabilities that make sense and remove resistances that don't. I also like that magic items overcome resistance/immunity to non magical attacks. It gives me the image of lord of the rings when Aragorn uses his sword against the deserters while all the other weapons were useless.
If they get rid of the non-magical damage resistance rule, then heavy armor mastery becomes an actually viable feat option since it can reliably reduce physical types of damage.
Resistance to non-magical weapon attacks is really good to challenge groups that are melee heavy and can give the casters a chance to shine. While I think that there may be too many lower level creatures that have this resistance, it is a great tool to be able to balance encounters for many groups, especially optimized ones. If you are running into a ton of creatures like this with no access to magic weapons, then your DM needs the feedback. My house rule would be to have the damage resistance to only apply on the first attack of each turn, so once the PC's get multiple attacks, this helps mitigate the damage reduction if the group doesn't have magic weapons yet.
I think the new model for creatures like werewolves is regeneration (stopped by silver), that's what the loup garou in VRGtR has.
I feel to some degree that D&D is trying to gradually go back and pull the features from 4th edition that worked, while leaving behind the stuff that didn't. Once you rescale for bounded accuracy, 4th edition monsters work just fine in 5e.
I still play 5e. I enjoy playing 5e for the most part (I'm a forever dm). However this video kinda explains why I am playing 50% Pf2e. Pf2e fixes a lot of these issues because resistances and immunities on monsters are varied and come up a lot more often. And its never just double or half damage like 5e (usually has a number attached). It makes monsters more interesting and make players have to do some rolls to figure out these things and they are able to capitalize on the knowledge. As much as I have enjoyed 5e, PF2e has made running combat and monsters so much more fun and interesting. Most 5e monsters are either spellcasters with subpar spell lists or sacks of hit points with multi attack (and maybe resistance to non magical attacks but this video explains why that its bad). Overall great video and I still like the content, but the wishful hoping that OneDND is going to improve all our issues with 5e is just that, wishful thinking.
I have Spellforged Weapons in my campaign. They have an enduring enchantment, are sturdier than normal weapons, and harm creatures resistant to normal weaponry. This creates greater accesibility to reliable damage for martials at low level. Of course I have also been playing exclusively levels 10-20 for the past three years, so it's not really a problem anyway. In general, the only characters who sometimes have a problem causing full damage are Gunslingers and other firearm users. Those characters prioritize finding workarounds, so it's not much of an issue really.
With all that said, I do like it when the vampire brushes the minimum damage arrow from his chest and only looks annoyed as much as I do when a character pulls out his warhammer against a group of skeletal enemies and goes to town. So I would like to see more thematic vulnerabilities and resistances, but I don't mind it when some monsters are merely annoyed by "the puny weapons of men". I also don't mind Immunity to certain damage types. Having an attack fail or underperform shouldn't create such despondency that the character just gives up. Switching tactics, using the environment, and teamwork can still win the day and allow a resourceful player to shine even brighter because they weren't just standing there chipping away.
There are also monsters with elemental immunities/resistances and magic resistance. No one boo-hoo's for the spell casters when they have a hard time getting their magic to be effective, and the reason is that they are probably packing /something/ that will have an effect due to the high utility of magic in general (unless they are dedicated to some element thematically, and in that case they knew what they were getting themselves into). I think more varied resistances and vulnerabilities would allow weapons to represent some of the same utility magic offers, and I'm all for it.
On a sidenote... if Celestials were vulnerable to Necrotic, and therefore Fiends were vulnerable to Radiant, that puts a vary specific emphasis on mankind's role in the battle between good and evil. ;-)
My recollection of the oldest editions was that it was much rarer to get these kinds of resistances, and it was mainly thematic (vampires, werewolves, demons etc). Even then, it was too easy to get around them with "magic" weapons .. and then they started with the "Oh, no, you need a +2 or better" for the "tougher" creatures and sure enough it all went to shit by the time we got "DR 30/byeshk" (you remember byeshk?)
Adding more vulnerabilities also makes combat more fun and interactive for players. Going into a fight, instead of it just being a slug feast, the players are communicating and going "did that fire bolt do more damage? okay, lets start hitting it with fire!". Or you have a situation where you know about the monster beforehand and the players can seek out information regarding vulnerabilities.
Something that I didn't hear in the video is that 3e did this, but the "golfbag" of equipment was considered a negative, which is why 3.5e moved to a "tiered" system, which "nonmagical bludgeoning, Piercing, or slashing" is a remnant of.
One fix to the Magic Arrow problem is to change the feat so you can choose your damage type, like the following feats you mentioned do. Or maybe on a rest you can choose a damage type and add 1d6 of that element on top of every attack you make until your next rest. If that's a bit OP you could give it limited charges, maybe corresponding to your proficiency bonus, or you could make it a d4. Idk, I'll let you number crunchers work out if that's a good idea or not, I just wanted to chip in with an idea.
For the part about house rules and the archer getting the useless feature, as the dm I'd bring it up to any effected players and allow them to replace it with a feat of equal/ greater power like the magic arrow can ignore full cover a # of times equal to your prof. Bonus or something.
I remember playing at 3.5 game and there was animated truck that I was able to damage because I was using a rape gear which don't piercing. Damage but others who were using slashing or blushing weapons work not harming this thing. I like that
Fantastic points and I 100% agree on all the major points (although I'd be careful about giving out too many vulnerabilities).
I STOPPED giving monsters resistance to magical BPS damage it in my campaign. Particularly because I don't like giving out magical weapons early and this damage type unfairly punishes early game martial characters and has NO affect on monsters HP in the later stages of the game!
I completely agree with your points and the best solution is to fix Conjure Animals and Animate Objects.
Those spells just make it more difficult for DMs, especially new ones, and bog down combat.
Animate objects should just allow 1 Large, 2 Medium, 4 Small, or 2 swarms of Tiny objects with stats adjusted to be comparable to other 5th level spells.
Conjure Animals just needs to remove the summon 8 creatures option.
Some notes I have with this:
1) I have been running PF2 and there are a lot of vulnerabilities. Many of the monsters which traditionally have resistances got HP bumps and vulnerabilities instead.
2) The rule makes a lot more sense when magic weapons are not readily available. I think one of the worst design changes into 5e was expecting people who have played from 3.0 onwards to not expect magic weapons to be so common that the party is tripping over the ones so obsolete they are just left on the ground.
The only reason I can think of why non-magical weapon damage exists on some monsters is to extend combats one the party gets to around levels 4-7, to balance (somewhat) against the Extra Attack feature that martial characters get in that zone.
The Grick has Natural Armor, the thematic reason for resistance is that it’s skin/hide/body is super tough so a magic weapon overcomes that easier.
I've had skeletons etc be completely immune to piercing damage. I imagine a rapier or arrow just bouncing in between the rib cage and doing nothing at all.
Makes sense. Either blunt weapons (like a hammer or club) and magic might work better on that enemy type. I learned a lot while playing Vagrant Story (PSx game from Sqaresoft).
I do three things.
1. Separate bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing into three separate categories.
2. Add Vulnerability (you're right, I have no idea why they don't use this)
3. Add a mechanic where particular single use items grants the weapon the ability to be "magical".
Example for number 3, a werewolf is Vulnerable to Silver (in my game), instead of finding a silver dagger, you have a silver powder that you put on your weapon to make it affective for 5 rounds.
I had a long hiatus from TTRPG play and when I started with 5E was surprised there were no levels of immunity. In the earliest versions of DND some monsters were immune to anything below a +2 weapon. Others required a +3. It went up to iron golems and the strongest devils and demons, plus ancient dragons and divine avatars, immunity to any lesser weapon than +5. This might be going the wrong direction for those wanting to reduce the role of magic items in favour of personal abilities and super powers, but it would gate powerful monsters from low level characters without opening up the whole monster manual to anyone with a +1 dagger. It's also consistent with the video game logic of different metals doing more damage and affecting more powerful enemies, up to daedric metal and holy swords being required to damage the most powerful demons.
I've been thinking a lot about this in my rules rewrite. I'm considering developing a set of feats which specifically grant the character the ability to overcome piercing, slashing or bludgeoning resistance in addition to features which enhance one of those damage types in a similar manner to the bludgeoner piercer and slasher feats
It'd basically be like a character is finding ways for those weapons to break through those defences.
It may be a good way to remove the magical aspect of those resistances as then the agency is on the player, do they want to deliver consistent Bludgeoning damage or do they want to pick a different feat/ASI?
Ok but would you rather fight sixteen raptor sized barbarians or one barbarian sized raptor?
As written, Conjure Animals doesn't let the player choose what the animals are though. So while yes theoretically someone could summon all these velociraptors, in practice it really depends on how the table runs the spell.