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Messages - Leviathan

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41
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: Reasons for Inclusion - Questions about 3.5's most powerful (legacy) abilities
« on: July 31, 2014, 11:05:58 PM »
In 3.5, depending on what you do, it is possible to use the same rules to play many very different games: high-mortality level 1 play, rocket tag, guess-what-I'm-not-immune-to, politics, ... . Your game can be Dark Souls, Skyrim, or Professor Layton.

The problem with this is that the game isn't very aware of this, and does next to nothing to make its players aware of it. As a result, each person (including the DM) shows up prepared for the game they were expecting to play. When some people expect to play one game and others expect to play another game, conflict ensues.

Each of the things you have listed are important parts of some of these games, but antithetical to others:
  • Permanent minions belong to that part of D&D wherein players are powerful wizardly types (though not necessarily wizards in game terms). Could anyone without permanent outsider minions be said to wield ultimate cosmic power? Yet their ready availability means that any sufficiently high-level spellcaster has the option of becoming that powerful, which many (you included, it seems) do not want.
  • The main problem with open-ended form-changing seems to be that it interacts poorly (i.e. too strongly) with other parts of the game - monsters were not created with the intent that they be available to players. 3.5 is full of situations where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. So is any document with that many authors and insufficient oversight (the Bible, any system of laws, etc.).
  • Silent image and its ilk come from a part of 3.5 where effects are adjudicated by negotiation between players and DMs: they were not meant to be lawyered. (Or rather, it was expected that they be lawyered in the traditional sense, with arguments and human decision-makers.)
  • Some people are of the opinion that absolute immunities should be available; some are of the opinion that they should not be available. The hard counters were included for use by the first group. The second group were free to ignore them, until monsters and challenges were constructed that assumed their availability.
  • Niche magic items can be part of an eccentric character concept. I have no idea why being eccentric requires being sub-par in other areas, however. You would think that D&D players of all people would be accepting of eccentricity! (I also think that wealth-by-level guidelines are partly to blame for this: the opportunity cost of buying a weird, cool item isn't just the useful stuff you could have bought with that money but also the possibility of earning more money to spend on useful stuff.)

42
Off Topic Fun / Re: Things that make you LoL (Part 3)
« on: July 27, 2014, 11:53:48 PM »
You know you're a mathematician when:
  • You misread "Oriental Adventures" as "Orientable Adventures".
  • That leads you to imagine adventuring on a non-orientable surface (such as everybody's favorite, the Möbius strip).
  • You think that's funny enough to post in this thread.

43
Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: Feat brainstorming
« on: July 26, 2014, 09:40:08 PM »
Huh. Whoops. Looks like my cheese detector is just poorly calibrated. Carry on then.

44
Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: Feat brainstorming
« on: July 26, 2014, 09:23:37 PM »
Quote from: Braininthejar on July 26, 2014, 07:09:56 PM
ACT AS ONE
Reacting to your companion's body language is your second nature.
Requirement: animal companion or familiar
Benefit: As long as you and your animal companion/familiar are within 5 feet of each other, you act simultaneously - roll initiative for both of you and use the better result. Also, you treat each other as part of yourself for the purpose of confusion effects.


Rolling initiative twice and taking the better result is very powerful - with that alone, this is much better than Improved Initiative, which (as far as I know) is a pretty strong feat.

45
Oslecamo's Improved Monster Classes / Re: General Discussion and Sugestions
« on: July 24, 2014, 07:38:47 PM »
I'm not picky, but I do like swarms.

46
Gaming Advice / Re: Greenbound Summoning + Child of Winter?
« on: July 24, 2014, 03:56:07 PM »
One important part of being a "target" is that the spellcaster chooses the target(s) of the spell. But with summoning spells you don't - in fact, you can't - choose a specific individual. Instead, you choose a kind of creature, and the summoning spell brings a "manifestation" of that kind of creature to you (see the SRD).

47
Oslecamo's Improved Monster Classes / Re: General Discussion and Sugestions
« on: July 24, 2014, 01:27:48 AM »
Several of the dragon classes (and possibly others) say this about their fly speeds:
Quote
The maneuverability doesn't increase naturaly, but players can take the Savage Species feat that increases it by two steps(stackable).

I looked in Savage Species, and I couldn't find this feat. There is a feat called Improved Flight, found in Complete Adventurer and Races of the Wild, which only increases maneuverability by one step.

48
Off Topic Fun / Re: MtG, what to get
« on: July 17, 2014, 07:49:52 PM »
The answer depends on what formats he plays most often. If he just plays casually, or if he plays standard constructed, I'd go with M15. If he plays commander (EDH) or an older constructed format, he's probably more interested in specific cards than in booster packs. If he prefers a limited format like drafts, you should just give him money with the understanding that he should spend it on events at his local store.

49
General D&D Discussion / Re: Thought Experiment: Name that society's alignment
« on: July 16, 2014, 02:37:27 AM »
The thing with anarchism (or communism, or many similar movements) is that it involves two stages. In the first stage, the existing system is torn down or removed, which is clearly a chaotic act. In the second stage, a new order arises; this new order is often lawful and almost never chaotic.

It follows the same pattern as "you have to spend money to make money" - by doing something contrary to your goals in the short term, you make those goals more achievable in the long term. (This is also how governments justify stuff like torture.)

The people who do well at the tearing down in the first stage are usually not very good at building things up again in the second. When the revolutionaries hold power (as happened in the French Revolution), they carry on the revolution, instead of pursuing the ideals that inspired it.

50
Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: (At Least) One Feat A Day
« on: July 15, 2014, 01:20:42 AM »
Not really. Piety is just devotion, and an iconoclast destroys icons - physical symbols. A pious iconoclast might destroy icons because he or she believes they get in the way of a direct connection between a worshiper and his or her god(s).

There are a lot of people (in the United States; I don't know about in other countries) who say they are "spiritual but not religious" - that is, they have some belief system that might be called a religion, but they don't like the formal organizations that tend to accompany religion.

Another possibility is if you believe that the organizations of your religion are actually heretical - they misinterpret scripture or prophecy, they abuse their power, they're just in it for the money, .... Every sufficiently extensive reform movement has to make room for itself in people's minds (if not in physical space) by destroying and replacing whatever came before it.

51
Min/Max 3.x / Re: Yak Folk makes a decent Gish?
« on: July 13, 2014, 05:47:55 AM »
How do you get hit dice from a level adjustment? Isn't the point of LA that it doesn't give you HD?

Edit: Just saw the alternate way to parse that phrase, which would be equivalent to "(not including his level adjustment or any Hit Dice from his creature type)". Yay English!

52
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: High ground rules.
« on: July 08, 2014, 09:31:26 PM »
Regarding the Elocater ability, if you're floating you aren't on the ground at all, so you can't be on high ground.

(click to show/hide)

53
Gaming Advice / Re: How to use this opportunity?
« on: June 30, 2014, 02:53:56 PM »
Split the party. Introduce the players to the major players (if they don't already know them), then let each player individually meet with whichever side they agree with most. When the party reconvenes, each player represents a different viewpoint and they can hash it out among themselves.

54
Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: (At Least) One Feat A Day
« on: June 28, 2014, 02:55:27 PM »
A bonus to "Strength and attack rolls" could be interpreted as "a bonus to Strength and a bonus to attack rolls" or as "a bonus to Strength rolls and a bonus to attack rolls" (whatever a Strength roll is). The easiest fix is to insert "to" between "and" and "attack", so it reads "a +2 morale bonus to Strength and to attack rolls", which is not ambiguous in that way.


Edit: Sorry if this sounds mean or pedantic... I'm a big fan of your work and I just want it to be as usable as it can be.

55
Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: (At Least) One Feat A Day
« on: June 26, 2014, 11:37:03 PM »
Where is Trophy Hunter from? PHBII has a feat called "Trophy Collector".

56
Off Topic Fun / Re: The Small Rants Thread VIII: Now more bitchin' than ever.
« on: June 17, 2014, 09:15:05 PM »
Quote from: Amechra on June 17, 2014, 08:51:11 PM
My computer just crashed entirely due to overheating. Me thinks I should start investing in a heat sink.


Have you tried cleaning the fan? If this is the first time this has happened you could save yourself some money with a screwdriver and a bottle of compressed air.

57
Gaming Advice / Re: Has anyone ever tried to organize the D&D 3.5 handbook writers?
« on: June 10, 2014, 10:53:46 PM »
Can't you do all of that with a wiki?

58
Off Topic Fun / Re: Computer advice needed
« on: June 06, 2014, 03:42:05 PM »
Did anything weird happen the last time your computer turned off?

59
The Scrolls of Lost Magic / Re: Fleshgrafting Index & General Discussion
« on: May 29, 2014, 11:19:32 AM »
Two questions about the feats:

1) If you take Extra Arm twice, do you get another +2 to Strength-based checks and grapple checks (total +4 from the feat) or just the extra arm listed on the "Special" line? A similar question applies for the Extra Leg and Extra Head feats.

2) For the Undead Attunement and Undead Concurrence feats, when (if ever) does your pool of penalty-free rounds refill?

60
Min/Max 3.x / Re: Solo kill the Tarrasque at 13th level.
« on: May 27, 2014, 07:42:04 PM »
I think you are overgeneralizing. The sentence
Quote from: Tarrasque
The tarrasque is immune to effects that produce incurable or bleeding wounds, such as mummy rot, a sword with the wounding special ability, or a clay golem’s cursed wound ability.
consists of two parts: rules text and an example. The rules text is "The tarrasque is immune to effects that produce incurable or bleeding wounds", which means exactly what it says. Each of the three examples provided produces an incurable or bleeding wound, so the tarrasque is immune to them. Most sources of ability drain do not produce incurable or bleeding wounds (for example, the allip's wisdom drain explicitly does not produce a wound), so this sentence does not say that the tarrasque is immune to them. Because no other part of the tarrasque's description suggests that it might be immune to the allip's wisdom drain (or to the incorporeal touch attack by which the allip delivers the wisdom drain), the tarrasque is not immune to the wisdom drain. Its wisdom can be reduced to 0, and doing that would render it unconscious.

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