Author Topic: Challenging D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder Parties in Practice - Discussion thread!  (Read 3940 times)

Offline Endarire

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Offline tussock

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Registered to say ...


It's pretty good, covers most of the interesting things I've read about 3e over the years pretty well, in terms of what none of the rulebooks or game designers ever tell us. As you noted, because they playtested standard array blaster Wizards, and fixed 3.0 in large part by nerfing the Fighters, especially at higher levels, Pathfinder more so.

Minor criticism would be that it's weaselly in places, wouldn't stand up as a proper thesis or anything because you're not trying to. I see you're wanting to make people (your DM, us) think about certain things, but the best thing for that is to spark discussion, and little does that better than making a strong point and trying to defend it. I'm guessing your DM used AMFs a whole lot.  :)

So rather than describing how a Gish can be fun and also effective in corner cases but having some drawbacks, just say they suck from the start, and prove it. That bit where your team airship casters didn't take over the world with summoned angels is just them sandbagging, like most players do, it's quite easy to do if you set your mind to it.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060519a

Nuclear weapons, etc. Why the D&D team can't write good rules to save themselves, because they all bluntly refuse to optimise and get on with winning D&D, under threat of infinite retribution. I recall things like that from Bloodbowl development, where they all thought the rules were all awesome in the playtest league until a new developer was hired and he optimised in ignorance of their unspoken gentlemen's agreement to not foul all the time. Bla bla bla.
tussock

Offline Endarire

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Mutually Assured Destruction: If anything I use can be used against me, how'zbout I use nothing so nothing can be used against me?  That's taking the philosophy to the logical extreme and saying, "Let's not play."

I operated by this MAD (mutually assured destruction) viewpoint for a long time (as PC and GM), but it was mostly in the 'you're gonna be asking for it' territory.

So why does powerful magic exist in D&D settings?  In large part, it's strictly so NPC casters can support for the PCs.  It seems why raise dead-happy Clerics are around, but said Clerics don't use their slots for other things, like winning fights and raising Undead armies.  Same thing for Wizards and teleporting.

Offline tussock

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Yep. My answer to why many strong NPCs don't go adventuring is that encounters are only "fair" for the PCs. It's random death and dismemberment all over the place in the game world, we choose by meta-game fiat to play the characters who get lucky and always (mostly) find winnable fights to participate in with unusually high treasure amounts.

Adventuring is a source of real ultimate power, but 99% of adventurers die before they get there by hitting the harder fights too early. Helping someone else to go adventuring is thus self-preservation. While the players have a character who won't meet a hungry Great Wyrm at 1st level by dumb luck, the questor NPCs have no such guarantee. They may support more teams than the PCs off-screen, it's just that the other teams meet a grisly end before long.
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Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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The .doc repeats a lot of common CO knowledge. The one thing that it is entirely accurate about is that the CR system should be calibrated off of the caster progression. You say: "The CR system is most accurate against casters, who, by their spell lists, define level-appropriate abilities.  A Wizard20 is a CR20 threat.  A Fighter20 might be a CR8 threat."

This isn't exactly unusual wisdom, but it does need repeating. The logical corollary is that to keep up with a normal caster progression at ECL8, a mundane should have 20 levels of their class abilities. For anyone trying to make D&D balanced (cough, like me, cough) this is a quick way to do so. See the C8 folder inside my 30MB dump coming soon to the boards.

Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Fighter 20 as an 8 level progression =  :D
Your codpiece is a mimic.

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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I'm glad you approve. I'm sure I'll get trolled for it later (like every other time I repackage standard CO wisdom in a novel way) but I can throw up a C8 SRD if there's enough interest. I've already edited the HTML for people used to looking at pages like this.

Offline Endarire

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Based on what I understand, I like the notion of C8.  Please explain further.

Offline PlzBreakMyCampaign

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You did download my metacompendium, right? The thing where I released how to fix 3e with the fewest changes.. Let's see here dnd's character building\homebrew\1 campaign-based\C8

Oh... I linked the shortcut over to the builds area. I suppose I'll update that, but one could examine where it lead and then pull up the builds area: selected builds\homebrew\c8\c8 rules.txt

But first some maths before I quote myself. 20/2.5 = 8 . So you could scrunch a 20 level base class into 8 levels if you understand how to shove some abilities on either side of the odd levels. This would be obvious by examining the edited SRD pages I made, but that's the main idea. Basically you get to play a mundane 20 build in e8 without knee-capping all of your great class features. Spells are unaffected, since we all know that's where the power is. After all, any non-caster's capstone could fit in as an ECL 8 ability. The only reason they were "stretched" out to level 20 was because that's how long base classes were declared to be. See RAW spell-less Paladin for a nice example.

Other minor adjustments were made to each classes chassis to help "noob-proof" then and certain numbers are also squeezed (when it's really clear that having 6 level's of useless +1's should just be lumped in all at once). Again, the designers did this for "filler" (see the dead levels article if you just looooove lots of filler abilities). We just want the crunchy part. I'm not going to harp on these two little points. They are obvious when they occur, and aren't absolutely necessary, but you would find if you tried to make the charts that you'd end up doing something similar.

Ahem:
Quote
PrC levels that do not advance casting follow the 2.5 rule
Those that do progress casting follow a x1 progression.
If this makes certain class features unaccessible, you have to use legacy champion (which is itself now not squished) to get up to those levels
Example 1: Carn the mundane decides to take Exotic Weapon Master. He takes the first level which gives all class features of the non-squished progression at once.
Example 2: Brie the wizard takes Initiate of the 7 fold veil. Its full casting progression does not squeeze down any and therefore the class feature progression is unchanged.
Example 3: Candy the sorcerer takes Acolyte of the Skin its 50% casting progression squeezes down until it bumps into other caster-progressing levels. This makes the PrC 5 levels deep.
Example 4: Bob the bard goes into sublime chord. But since it grants a casting progression, it is full length.
Example 5: Cully the cleric vampire takes the Lifedrinker PrC. Since it doesn't advance his casting, it is only a 4 level PrC.

Metagame: This encourages casters to lose out on caster levels for the more flavorful PrCs. Now those wizards don't just shrug and say, take Master Specialist because its there and full casting.
Non-progressioned base class abilities for casters do get squished, though. This again encourages casters to single class more.
Mundane's progressions can be gained all at once at its initial level if it isn't correctly divisible and it isn't the class's main progression. See Rogue as an example.

I've already made it look pretty (look in the builds\homebrew\c8\srd folder!) but here's what the class abilities look like for Barbarian:
1) Fast movement, illiteracy, rage 1/day
2) Uncanny dodge
3) Trap sense +6
4) Improved uncanny dodge
5) Greater rage 3/day
6) Indomitable will
7) Damage reduction 5/—
8) Tireless rage, Mighty rage, rage 6/day

The capstone feels appetizing, the abilities are all there, and if becomes harder to find break points (which is a symptom of players turning their nose up at a class after a certain point). A class with a break point that no one ever goes past proves the class poorly made.

Indeed front-loaded classes don't need to be adjusted (who takes more than 2 levels of fighter without being a dungeon crasher??) as much: fighter 1,2,3 has 2 bonus feats before slowing down to 1 feat per level. ACFs can be inputted over the ability in place at whatever level. It's all very straight forward to me, but I'm happy to answer questions on it.