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Topics - perovskite

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Since my D&D campaign has been on hiatus for the last 5+ weeks, I've been getting my fix with tinkering with other stuff. Therefore, for your consideration, here is an adaption of the prestige class Abolisher, from Lords of Madness, designed to fight giants instead of aberrations. It doesn't have quite as much style or any strange abilities like the original abolisher, as giants are not as strange as aberrations. It's more about brute force.

Abolisher of Giants, aka the Giant Killer

Prerequisites
Type- Cannot be a giant
Alignment- Any, but normally non-evil
Skills- Knowledge- Nature 9 ranks, Survival 4 ranks
Feats- Track
Class Features- Wild Empathy


HD- d8
BAB- medium**
Saves- fort- poor***; reflex poor; will good
Class Skills- lose Knowledge: the planes; gain Knowledge: religion


1st- Favored Enemy Giant +2; wild shape +1/day; animal companion; spellcasting

2nd- +4 dodge bonus vs giants

3rd- Giant-Fighting Skill +1

4th- Favored Enemy- Giant +4; Wild shape +2/day

5th- Damage Reduction 2/-

6th- Giant-Fighting Skill +2

7th- DR 4/-

8th- Favored Enemy- Giant +6; Wild shape +3/day

9th- Giant-Fighting Skill +3; DR 6/-^

10th- Giant-Bane^^; DR 10/-


Spellcasting: As per the existing Abolisher class description.

Favored Enemy (Ex): At 1st level, you gain Giants as a favored enemy, as per the ranger class ability. Your bonus vs giants increases to +4 at 4th level and +6 at 8th level. These bonuses stack with Favored Enemy bonuses granted from other classes.

Wild Shape (Su): As per the existing Abolisher class description.

Animal Companion: As per the existing Abolisher class description.

Giant-Fighting Skill (Ex): At 3rd level, the giant-killer gains a +1 bonus to all attack rolls and all opposed rolls against giants. This bonus increases to +2 at 6th level and +3 at 9th level.

Damage Reduction (Ex): At 5th level, the Giant-Killer gains Damage Reduction 2/-. This DR increases to DR 4/- at 7th level, DR 6/- at 9th level, and DR 10/- at 10th level. This DR stacks with DR granted by other classes and feats.

Giant-Bane (Ex)- At 10th level, all weapons you wield (ranged or melee; manufactured or natural; magical, masterwork, or mundane) gain the giant bane property, just as if the weapon was enchanted with that property, while you wield that weapon. The weapon’s enhancement bonus increases by +2 and the weapon does an additional 2d6 damage vs giants, for a total of +2 attack, +2d6+2 damage vs giants. This ability stacks with that of weapons already possessing the giant-bane enchantment. For example, a +1 giant-bane great sword wielded by a ranger 6/abolisher 10 would, when used against a giant, become a +5 double giant bane greatsword, and inflict 2d6+5+4d6 damage vs giants (plus bonuses derived from other class features). This is a continuous effect and does not require activation.


*- Yeah, I know there’s a class with an identical name in Silver Marches. It’s 3.0 Forgotten Realms, I play in a 3.5 home-brew setting, and that class is pretty underwhelming. (Dodge, mobility AND toughness as prerquisites? Ha.)
**- This is mostly because I would feel the need to cut spell casting progression to 5/10 if this class was full BAB.
***- The only reason I can think of to include good fort progression would be because of death from massive damage, which is a possibility once you get to a level where the giants are power attacking you. However, the intended entry for this class remains ranger 6, druid 6, or something similar.
****- should this be competence, or untyped? You tell me.
^ - The DR is designed to replace the defensive part of the Fires of Nature’s Rage ability, but I figured the DR should be scaled in, rather than go from nothing to DR 10/- at 10th level, which was my original idea.
^^ - Should this stack with an enchanted weapons existing giant-bane property? I mean, it really wouldn’t be that big a deal vs the kind of stuff wizards and clerics will be doing at 16th level. Second, should this ability have a duration, like 3/day for 5 rounds, or 3/day for 5 rounds plus Wis modifier? This honestly strikes me as too weak an ability if it is limited to 3/day for a few rounds. Are there any obvious abuses to this I'm not seeing?

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Creations & Ephemera / Army of PCs Against the Giants Discussion Thread
« on: January 08, 2019, 12:31:34 AM »
Presumably, this is the right place for such things. Right, so a discussion thread for those so inclined about the apparently fairly popular campaign log...Against the Giants. There will be no regular updates, and I may or may not answer questions, cause at least one of my players also lurks on these hallowed boards.

I'm curious to see what you all think about some house rules we use and of the builds for some of the characters. So today, one house rule, and one character build:

The Rule- fighters may exchange their armor and shield proficiencies for other fighter bonus feats. We call these fighter exchange feats. This option is exercised at 1st level, and the exchange feats are gained at odd levels. Thus, at 1st level a fighter can get two bonus feats. You cannot exchange a feat that is a prerequisite for a feat you're keeping (you can't lose light and medium armor proficiency but keep heavy armor proficiency, for example).

So yes, a clever player will take, say, a level of ranger, then a level of fighter, and dump all the fighter's armor and shield feats for 5 extra bonus feats, to be gained over the course of 9 levels of fighter. Since fighters never get anything nice, I see no issue.

The Build: Navussar is designed to be a ranger, but more so. Currently, he's a ranger 10/beastmaster 1. (updated on 7 May from ranger 8/beastmaster 1)
Navussar- male half elf ranger 10/beastmaster 1/cleric 1/lion of talisid 8

Feats:
1- power attack, track*
2- rapid shot*
3- skill focus- handle animal, endurance*
6- favored power attack, manyshot*
9- natural bond
12- favored of the companions, improved precise shot*, animal devotion* (instead of animal domain)
15- extend spell
17- exalted companion*
18- TBD

This gives BAB +17, caster level and spells/day as cleric 9 and ranger 10; animal companion as a 20th-level druid, wild shape large 4/day, and pounce (although pounce shows up really late). I think I would just apply the celestial template to the existing animal companion.

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Legends of the Heroes / Army of PCs Against the Giants
« on: May 04, 2018, 07:38:17 AM »
I'm almost two years into an Against the Giants campaign using the 2e Against the Giants: Liberation of Geoff module (with 3.5e crunch, and modified geography), and I thought it might be worth posting for all of your amusement/edification/disgust. The idea behind the format for the campaign is that wars involve a lot of people, so the notion of a band of five or six or eight heroes crisscrossing the land doing all the saving seems a tad implausible (also, I like variety). Thus, my one group of players and I are jumping between, let me count...approximately five different parties (they overlap a bit), all of whom are in various parts of Geoff and surrounding countries doing heroic and/or mercenary things.

We run sessions using Google Docs, and so I'll just be copying the transcriptions of what we did, until and unless that becomes cumbersome and offensive. To keep the whole thing organized, I have an all-consuming set of spreadsheets telling me where each party and the major NPCs are on any given day, so that I can avoid continuity errors, and allows for amusing things like one party casually walking past a villain on his way to fight another party two days later. (The fight was played first, so the players knew who this set of PCs was walking past, but their characters had no idea.)

As far as optimization level: for yea, though I am not worthy to sweep the hallways of this hallowed temple of optimization, I am nigh unto a grandmaster compared to everyone else in my group. So it's pretty toned down.

I'll not bore you with a description of every PC in the game just yet, cause there are nearly 30 of them, just the parties.

So, the parties:
The Most Ancient and Original Group- the MAOG was rolled up in the early 90's when we played 1e, and was later updated to 2e and 3.5e. So the characters have existed for 22-24 years or so. The average level is 11, with one being 14 due to a quirk of the 2e to 3e conversion rules. This will be the first time we've used these characters in 3.5e.
Zodhunters- some gangster named Zod (no relation to the Superman villain) stole some stuff from these guys' mom. Average level is 7.
Kat's Krew- Katreana (female elf/Wiz 9/LG) was part of the MAOG, but was at the other end of the continent when the campaign started, so she had to adventure her way to Sterich, and picked up some people while she did. Average level 9.
Dwarven Volunteer Corps- Some of the fluff for this says the various mountain dwarf clans are too busy bickering to bother with all the giants they could ever want to kill, so one character went to recruit some volunteers. Average level 4.
Sephira & Co- Sephira (female halfling/Sor 6/don't remember) worked for Duke Owen of Geoff until she found a book referring to an ancient lammasu, and requested a leave of absence to go see what she can find. (We refluffed the Rainbow Servant prestige class into a Lammasu Servant prestige class for this.) Average level 6. This is presently the active group.
Singletons- There are a couple of PCs not currently in any party at the moment; such characters, or people whose players are not present tend to get used as NPCs. For example, the 14th level guy is effectively an NPC until the rest of his party catches up.

That all I have the battery life for at the moment. We shall see how this goes.


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D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Recommend some rules to adapt
« on: September 17, 2017, 05:12:56 PM »
Oh Great and Mighty MinMax Board dwellers:

I'm running an Against the Giants campaign using 3.5e rules (instead of 2e), and, spoiler alert, I intend to run it such that the cloud giants are behind everything. Eventually the party will go to the flying cloud giant island to fight them, as is right and proper.

It occurs to me that the party could take control of one of the cloud islands (which detaches from the rest, and which they'll probably have to do to get to the cloud islands anyway), and use it to ram other parts of the cloud island, instead of just grinding through 65+ cloud giants.

So the question is: can anyone suggest some rules to adapt from vehicle-to-vehicle combat (or ship to ship combat) that I could use to adjudicate such things? I haven't been able to find any.

Also, there's no hurry, I don't expect the PCs to get to the cloud giants for two years of real time.

Thanks,

-perovskite

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Introduce Yourself / Hello MinMax Boards
« on: September 17, 2017, 05:01:29 PM »
Greetings all,

Glad to see the boards were resurrected quickly.

So I've been playing D&D of various types since the early 90s, starting with 1e, and currently 3.5e. As for non-D&D types hobbies, we have...numismatics and some older video games.

And now to actually start posing questions to the boards, instead of merely lurking.

-perovskite

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