Discussion

[sirpercival]

Please post any comments or critiques here; I'll be locking threads until the rest of the material is posted.

[Garryl]

Copying over my working notes so they aren't lost.

Working on some ideals.
I'm not doing the exotic weapons. Those, I leave to you, Sirpercival.
I'll get to the disciplines later.

Chromatic

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Blue Dragon

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Desert mirage, Earth

Energy Type: Electricity
Discipline: Shocking Sky
Skills: Bluff, Spellcraft
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Sound Imitation. DC 10 + 1/2 level + Cha (or standardized ideal save DC if it exists).
2 - 10' burrow speed.
3 - Spend Ideal Power to destroy all liquids within 30'. Unattended liquids are turned to dust. Magic potions, elixirs, and other magical liquids are allowed a Will save to avoid being rendered inert. Living creatures take 2d6 damage and are dehydrated (essentially just fatigued but harder to heal), Will halves damage and negates dehydration. Creatures with the Water subtype instead take 1d6 damage/idealist level, Will half. You can choose to affect or not affect creatures or objects of your choice.
   Can also use this ability to undo the destruction of liquids caused by this ability within the last 1 minute, restoring destroyed items and healing damage done.
4 - Spend Ideal Power to use Hallucinatory Terrain or Major Image.
5 - A mirage constantly shrouds your position. You have 8 mirror images, as the spell. Destroyed images reappear at a rate of 1 per round.

Green Dragon

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Marsh and bog theme but forest environment, Air

Energy Type: Acid
Discipline: Caustic Tempest
Skills: Bluff, Move Silently
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Immune to inhaled poisons.
2 - Water breathing (see Black dragon ideal).
3 - Spend an ideal power to use Suggestion.
4 -
5 - Spend an ideal power to surround yourself with a Acid Fog that moves with you (treat as an emanation centered on you). You are immune to its damaging and slowing effects, although it obscures your sight as normal. Can dismiss as a free action.

Red Dragon

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Avarice and greed, warm mountains, Fire

Energy Type: Fire
Discipline: Desert Wind
Skills: Appraise, Jump
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Take no damage from catching on fire. You can ignite yourself as a free action.
2 - Automatically aware of the most valuable magic item you do not already own within 120'. You can pinpoint its location (as blindsense) and you know its abilities as Identify.
3 -
4 - Automatically aware of all unattended objects worth at least 20000g within 1 mile. You can sense the approximate direction, distance, and value of any such object you focus on as a standard action. By spending an ideal power, you can use Find the Path as the spell to find the path to the object you concentrate on. Multiple objects within 60' of each other count as a single object for the purpose of this ability.
5 -

White Dragon

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Blizzard, cold mountains, Cold

Energy Type: Cold
Discipline: Frozen Zephyr
Skills: Move Silently, Swim
Exotic Weapons:

1 - No longer need to make balance checks for walking on ice. Take no penalties for climbing icy surfaces.
2 - Leave a layer of rime in your path. Every surface you walk or climb on (in the spaces you pass) is covered by a layer of ice for 1 minute, which functions as the Grease spell. This also allows you to walk on liquids, freezing the surface of the liquid up to 1 inch thick per two idealist levels. Acid, lava, and other dangerous liquids deal contact damage (not immersion) each round to the ice. You can suppress or resume this ability as a free action, even in the middle of movement.
3 - Spend an ideal power to conjure a blizzard that follows you. This functions as Sleet Storm, except that it is an emanation centered on you.
4 - Spend an ideal power to use Wall of Ice.
5 -

Template

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Energy Type:
Discipline:
Skills:
Exotic Weapons:

1
2
3
4
5

Metallic

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Brass Dragon

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Curiosity and conversational, warm desert, Fire

Energy Type: Fire
Discipline:
Skills: Bluff, Gather Information
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Speak with animals.
2 - Spend an ideal power to turn your breath weapon into sleep gas. Deals minimum damage as nonlethal damage, and also requires a Will save or fall asleep (as Sleep, but not mind-affecting compulsion) for 1 round per 2 dice of damage dealt.
3 -
4 -
5 -

Bronze Dragon

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temperate hills, Water
Streams and rivers? Likes animals.
Electricity/Repulsion gas

Energy Type: Electricity
Discipline:
Skills: Disguise, Survival
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Speak With Animals at will.
2 -
3 - Spend an ideal power to use Summon Nature's Ally (animals only). But how to determine the level?
4 -
5 -

Copper Dragon

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Warm hills, Earth
Big sense of humor. Earth manipulator.
Acid/Slow gas

Energy Type: Acid
Discipline:
Skills: Hide, Jump
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Spend an ideal power to use Tasha's Hideous Laughter.
2 - Spend an ideal power to turn your breath weapon into slow gas. Deals nonlethal damage, and also requires a Will save or be slowed (as Slow) for 1 round per 2 dice of damage dealt.
3 - Burrow speed (1/2 land speed)
4 -
5 -

Gold Dragon

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Warm plains, Fire
Luck, gems, sun, destiny
Fire/Weakening gas (Str damage)

Energy Type: Fire
Discipline: Phoenix Tear
Skills: Disguise, Heal
Exotic Weapons:

1 - Spend an ideal power to infuse a gem worth at least 50g with the power of good fortune. Whoever holds it can discharge the effect as a standard action to gain the benefits of Improvisation. After being used or after 24 hours, the gem returns to normal.
2 - Instead of dealing damage, you can cause your breath weapon to deal 1 Strength damage per two dice of damage normally dealt (Fort negates).
3 - If you infuse a gem worth at least 250g, the gem can instead grant the effect of Recitation.
4 - Use the Holy Radiance invocation.
5 - If you infuse a gem worth at least 1250g, but no more than once per day, the gem can instead grant the effect of Choose Destiny.

Silver Dragon

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Temperate mountains, Cold
Air, sky, clouds, high altitude
Cold/Paralysis gas

Energy Type: Cold
Discipline:
Skills: Bluff, Jump
Exotic Weapons:

1 -
2 -
3 - Spend an ideal power to use Air Walk.
4 -
5 -

[sirpercival]

Lol.  I just posted about that in the original thread.

[sirpercival]

Alright, question.  How do I organize each Ideals post?  Here's the situation:

~The Ideal powers will be the same for all Idealists, as will the Damage and Resistance entry.
~Each Idealist class will get something class-specific from each Ideal.  WW's will get disciplines, skills, and exotic weapon profs, while Dragonmages will get spells known and maybe something else.  Not sure yet what Scalethieves will get.

My thought was, for each post, have spoilered sections: Ideal powers, WW class-specific, Dm class-specific, ST class-specific.  Within each section there will be writeups for each dragon.

Does that sound intuitive?  Can anyone think of a better setup?

[Garryl]

Gold Dragon is done but for a discipline (and exotic weapons, but I don't like to touch those). I've kinda tapped out the disciplines I really know about, and I don't really have the energy to look through what's around for what might fit.

Keep the contents of each ideal together. Bits that are hyper-specific to a given class and can't be summarized in a couple of lines should be spoilered further, but otherwise keep it as open as possible so people can skim it at a glance.

Have you decided on a primary mechanic for Scalethieves?

[sirpercival]

Have you decided on a primary mechanic for Scalethieves?

Not yet.  At the moment the leading candidate is skill & feat abilities... the problem with most homebrew mechanics out there is that I'd have to add a ton of content to make it stack up with WW & Dm.

[littha]

I would have thought something like skill tricks but that would be a pain and a half to do.

[sirpercival]

I would have thought something like skill tricks but that would be a pain and a half to do.

Yeah, there just aren't enough skill tricks around.  I'd have to write a ton of them.

[Garryl]

What kinds of mechanics have already been used for skillmonkey type? Usually it's just +xd6 precision damage somehow, but there are a few classes that have something more. Factotum (Inspiration), Ninja (Ki), um, any others? I think the Malefactor is a skillful type, although I don't really know of that many homebrew skillmonkeys. Kellus's Truenamer came close-ish, I think.

Other than spellcasting and ToB, I don't think there are any subsystem around with the breadth to support so many ideals. Even ToB can only do it due to the amazing homebrew support it has. What was it, 160 or so homebrew disciplines? On top of the 9 that were actually printed in ToB? Spellcasting might be big enough because it gets all the support WotC has to offer, but it isn't neatly sorted by theme like ToB's disciplines are. Domains are the closest you'll get to themed spell groupings, but they're a little small and there are too few of them to use exclusively. Offhand, I'd guess there to be about 75 domains, plus another 20 or so Wizard domains in UA. That might be just enough, although since they don't all sync exactly with the dragon types that are around, you might have to make a few more to fill the gaps if you go with domains. There are, what, about 50-60 ideals planned?

What might be interesting is to have a combination of subsystems (assuming you can't find one that's big enough already). Depending on the ideal, you might get some truenaming, incarnum, binding, ritual casting, inspiration, spellshaping, synthevolving, morphing, implementing, slicing, activating, echocalling, chronomancy, etc. abilities for the day. There are enough homebrew systems around, you can probably do it with no more than two or three ideals granting the same system, although you might want more overlap for the larger systems so people can get access to more than the bare minimum of it.

[sirpercival]

I was basically going to make my own arcane domains for Dm.  That's just a matter of organizing, not writing 193834958 spells, so it's fine.

I like that collection-of-subsystems idea... make it a very swiss-army-knife kind of a class.  It'll likely be complicated to play, though... one thing that could be fun is giving each Ideal grouping a unique subsystem.  Like all chromatics are implementing or what have you.

[littha]

I was basically going to make my own arcane domains for Dm. 

I would have just been lazy and given the ability to cast any spell with the same energy type as your damage/resistance...

[Garryl]

I was basically going to make my own arcane domains for Dm. 

I would have just been lazy and given the ability to cast any spell with the same energy type as your damage/resistance...

That would leave about 80% of the spells out, and make the rest available very easily with Energy Substitution.

I was basically going to make my own arcane domains for Dm.  That's just a matter of organizing, not writing 193834958 spells, so it's fine.

I like that collection-of-subsystems idea... make it a very swiss-army-knife kind of a class.  It'll likely be complicated to play, though... one thing that could be fun is giving each Ideal grouping a unique subsystem.  Like all chromatics are implementing or what have you.

There are a few classes like that already. Dabblemaster, Sentai, and Scavenger (I think) off the top of my head.

[littha]

I was basically going to make my own arcane domains for Dm. 

I would have just been lazy and given the ability to cast any spell with the same energy type as your damage/resistance...

That would leave about 80% of the spells out, and make the rest available very easily with Energy Substitution.

Depends how you word it. If your spell list contains only spells with the [Fire] descriptor then I fail to see how Energy Substitution helps. It does leave you with some rather small spell lists that pretty much only do blasting but that might actually be a good thing unless you want to go for all out god wizardry.

[Nanshork]

Just wanted to say that I like how this is going (even if it seems a bit overly ambitious), and I wanted to post so that I'll remember to keep tabs on it.

[sirpercival]

Just wanted to say that I like how this is going (even if it seems a bit overly ambitious), and I wanted to post so that I'll remember to keep tabs on it.

Lol.  I'm glad you like it!  And yes, I tend to be overly ambitious.

[sirpercival]

I posted the incomplete dragonmage.  It still needs some class features, and I have to work out the spell & Ideal progressions.

I'm going to start from the Sorc, but I want fewer spells known & per day to counterbalance the other class features.  When you first get access to a spell level, you'll have 0 spells known, but you get the floating spell from the Ideal.

So, my question is, what's a good progression for all this?  Any suggestions?

[littha]

Use the Wizards Spells/day table if you want less than sorcerer but a still usable ammount.


Your text refers to level 0 spells but they are absent from your table.

[FireInTheSky]

I'm going to start from the Sorc, but I want fewer spells known & per day to counterbalance the other class features.

You don't get to use both spells per day and and class features since the class features require you to sacrifice spell slots.  Or maybe just have some extra 1st level (sacrificial) slots.

When you first get access to a spell level, you'll have 0 spells known, but you get the floating spell from the Ideal.

It may have been that I was just reading too quickly, but I thought I read it as you get access to that spell, but you don't get a use of it for free.

[sirpercival]

I'm going to start from the Sorc, but I want fewer spells known & per day to counterbalance the other class features.

You don't get to use both spells per day and and class features since the class features require you to sacrifice spell slots.  Or maybe just have some extra 1st level (sacrificial) slots.

I meant the Ideal powers, mostly.

When you first get access to a spell level, you'll have 0 spells known, but you get the floating spell from the Ideal.

It may have been that I was just reading too quickly, but I thought I read it as you get access to that spell, but you don't get a use of it for free.

[/quote] Not sure what you mean.  You'll have spell SLOTS of the new level, but no spells known, so you can pick your floating spell from your Ideal to spend the slots on.

[Prime32]

Can I suggest a PrC which permanently binds you to an Ideal, and turns you into a true dragon of that type? (just grant size increases and the universal natural weapons/etc. of true dragons)