New answers tagged combat
1
Using a healing surge as a standard action is the entire point of the second wind action. The once-per-encounter limit serves as a reasonable limit on how much time you can spend (or waste) extending your useful capacity for tanking damage in a given fight. Every turn spent not making an attack is a turn added to the combat, which can wear on everyone at the ...
2
One thing I do to keep a narrative going is to give brief descriptions to normal attacks that have negligible outcomes, like an archer landing a hit that does 12 damage to a creature with 115 hp: "Your arrow sinks into its arm." When the damage reaches lower thresholds, say dealing a total of 100/115 hp, "The creature utters a guttural howl as ...
12
Homebrew terms have homebrew meanings
As far as I have found (I'm still looking) 5e does not use the exact term "damage modifier(s)". As such, there isn't a feature I can go off of for giving you a definition. The game defaults to standard English so I would assume it means "anything that modifies damage" but what that does or doesn't ...
10
Let's take a look at what the Blinded condition does.
Blinded (Core Rulebook pg. 618)
You can’t see. All normal terrain is difficult terrain to you. You can’t detect anything using vision. You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to ...
18
Frame challenge: this isn't actually important.
As I noted in my answer to your other question about initiative, this is not a game balance issue. The initiative "rules" about rolling once for groups of identical monsters are there to make your life easier - use them if you want, don't if you don't. So it doesn't matter what identical means here. ...
6
Volo's Guide to Monsters actually suggests that for Kobolds the GM should not group initiative rolls as usual and instead split the group of kobolds up so as to replicate a swarm attack and not give the players a chance to regroup or act as one.
So at least one occasion of RAW being not to do this. In the Kobolds: Little Dragons - Tactics section of Volo's ...
1
Is 20d6 sonic damage every turn overpowered compared to other 5th- to 7th-level character abilities?
You wouldn't be able to do it at all.
Fey Form:
"You can more easily cast spells that the creature has as spell-like abilities, although you must still cast them as normal for your class. When you cast a spell that the creature has as a spell-like ability, it requires no verbal or somatic components and can’t be countered."
Muse:
Ranged 5 sound ...
1
It is not game breaking
It is not even a house rule. Rolling initiative for each participant explicitly described in the PHB:
When combat starts, every participant makes a Dexterity check to determine their place in the initiative order
The PHB also adds that
The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures
So if creatures are identical, ...
14
In Virtual Tabletops (VTT), it's the standard.
If you play in on-line or virtual environments, like Roll20, this is usually the norm. I use tools that roll initiative for everything simultaneously and the Initiative Tracker points to which specific token is playing now. Makes the game less swingy (as turns are usually evenly distributed across both sides) ...
5
Game breaking in the sense of making the game much harder or easier for the players?
No.
Game breaking in the sense of the DM's brain hurting?
For sure, as soon as you have more than a handful creatures in combat. The rule exists because most people can't (or don't want to) track 15 mostly identical creatures in combat.
Individual initiative for more than 5 ...
27
I usually do this, but it can become difficult when the enemies are numerous.
This is what I usually do for initiative, and most of the time, it causes no issues at all. It is when the number of NPC combatants gets to be large that individual initiative starts to get cumbersome.
I once ran a battle against four NPCs with 8 bears and rolled them all ...
16
Because both reactions have the same trigger (the rogue being hit by an attack), the most logical ruling is that they are effectively simultaneous. Xanathar's Guide to Everything gives the following rule for resolving simultaneous effects (on page 77, at the start of the Dungeon Master's Tools chapter):
Simultaneous Effects
Most effects in the game happen ...
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