Talk:Dragon Ball 5E: Strongest Under The Heavens (5e Campaign Setting)

Formatting Thoughts

Hi, I'm one of the primary contributors of Dragon Ball (5e Campaign Setting) and I'm glad to see people working on non-PECR versions of settings I love, and I have some thoughts on how this setting can be improved.

Firstly, could we get a more concise name? As it is, each page has a 54-character identifier, which ends up with enormous page titles that are 9/10ths identifier, when all an identifier needs to be is a short tag that identifies what a page is supposed to be (for reference, the other DB setting has a 25-character identifier of "(Dragon Ball Supplement), and I wish I could get it down to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (5e Campaign Setting)'s 17-character "(JJBA Supplement)"). One solution could be to shorten the setting page to simply "Dragon Ball: Strongest Under the Heavens (5e Campaign Setting)" so we aren't double stating that this is for 5e and shorten the identifier to just "(DB:SUtH Supplement)". Along with this change, this setting should probably use a setting category different from "Dragon Ball Setting" so that it's easier to differentiate between pages from each setting (as above, probably a "DB:SUtH Setting" category).

Organizing the bestiary by saga restricts the available creatures to only those who play an active roll in a preexisting story, thus severely limiting a DM's ability to tell a new story (a problem I am certainly not immune to and have been fighting to remedy in my own work). Bestiary (Berserk Supplement) might be a decent example for how I'd set this up to give DMs a full list of options (in this example, groups like "Midland NPCs" and "Kushan NPCs" would be replaced with groups like "Earthling NPCs" and "Namekian NPCs").

Bulma (Og DB) (5e Creature) should probably just be a noble since there's really nothing mechanically special about her (yes the other Dragon Ball setting has a page for her, but this is mostly out of necessity to fill out a 1st level human martial artist due to using PECR). Site standards on page title formatting also put variant indicators (in this example "OG DB") after a comma rather than in parenthesis, and supplement pages should have supplement identifiers instead of base identifiers (correct formatting would be more like "Bulma, OG DB (Dragon Ball 5E: Strongest Under The Heavens Supplement)", though perhaps "Bulma, Pilaf Saga (DB:BT Supplement)" would work better). I'd also argue that Bulma doesn't mechanically change much throughout DB's runtime so differentiating between sagas/series for her probably isn't necessary. Additionally, her page lacks the Supplement category and this setting's category, as does Bear Thief (5e Creature).

I do have balance concerns with certain features (particularly those that increase your "stats" (should be ability scores) or regain hit points with no limit), but I'm more likely to just fix those directly, or at the very least make an edit to their talk pages individually. As I said before, I am glad this setting is being made and I'm excited to see it grow and improve.--Ref3rence (talk) 22:59, 18 March 2024 (MDT)

Yeah, in terms of ability score balancing, we plan on there being a lot of variant rules intended on being used with the supplement that would cause the game to not break. We also have a power level system planned (a way to calculate bp like the way the frost demons made to measure aliens) which would give certain boosts and allow canon bp multipliers on transformations for bp without it actually boosting ability scored that much. One of my main concerns is balancing ability score affecting abilities in this supplement as although it is dragon ball, and dragon ball characters are op, we also want to keep things from breaking. Thanks a lot for your feedback and I will try to edit the bestiary better, but it is my first time making a full campaign setting, so there is bound to be hiccups along the way. If you ever wanna help out with things, we could definitely use it, since im probably the most experienced one in the server when it comes to wiki formatting but theres stuff that i still have a hard time with (especially equipment). Thank you very much for the feedback, and we plan to take these things into consideration. -thefinale3

Also, we like to stick to canon as much as possible without breaking things, but things are HEAVILY subject to further balance changes, especially op races such as majin, and bio android.(I am considering just making the absorption feature only obtainable with a super rare background feat and even then will be further limited from its current version.) -thefinale3

My only worry about 100% canon accuracy is that 5e isn't really built to handle it, but I've seen crazier things pulled off with variant rules so I'll hold my tongue. If I can make a few suggestions regarding adding battle power levels, such a thing should probably replace classes (or at least how proficiency works) and a character's hit points, movement speed, and ki should probably be derived from their ability scores rather than their class level (determining them by a number that can range from 5 to well above 150,000,000 ends up requiring a hundred different Kamehamehas that just deal more damage and cost more ki). Such a system is also the main reason the other Dragon Ball setting uses PECR, since 5e's CR is built on 1v4s that would become a wash if the boss was 4 times harder hitting and more durable than the players in a setting where SSJ2's x2 multiplier is enough to go from being stomped to fighting on an equal level (this is partially where the above suggestion could help, with a boss could have the same power level but a higher Constitution modifier and thus more hit points, which is kinda what we see with Buu), but I already have a dozen projects I've been meaning to work on, so I leave any decisions to you.--Ref3rence (talk) 08:45, 19 March 2024 (MDT)