Min/Max Boards

Eesh. There are other threads to argue the connotations of alignments.

Anyways, this is more of a notion I can't stand rather than a stereotype I can't stand: that any mechanic has fluff baggage. What I mean is that a paladin must follow a deity, a rogue must be a sneaky backstabber who was raised in alleys, and all fighters are ex-military men. I hate it when DMs limit feats because "you couldn't have possibly been trained to do that with your backstory." Most of all, I hate when someone says, "I am [insert alignment], so I can't go/help/fight/etc. because a person of my alignment just wouldn't do that.

RP COMES BEFORE ALL ELSE BUT RAW.

I'm so glad my party finally figured this out... several times in the past they had attacked an NPC just because their alignment was evil even though the NPC had done nothing overtly threatening to the party (which did coincidentally make for awesome RP afterwards when they got arrested). I was so proud of them when they let the Evil Wizard who beat them to an artifact go free after he warned them of a demon summoning by teh cult of Rovagug [super evil destruction rage god who birthed the Tarrasque in Pathfinder] so he [the wizard] could go on fighting the BBEG of the campaign. They are finally learning  Of course finally having another player who prizes RP more then almost anything else [while still being quite effective in combat] has helped them along that road tremendously.

I've had to deal with this with several of my players... For example in the last session they were fighting a dragon that wa having fun burrowing around underground and then popping up and showering them with it's breath weapon and full attack. Instead of trying to think of a strategy to prevent this, the party's gunslinger decided it would be an absolutely brilliant idea to run on the dragon's treasure pile and start stealing shit  So naturally he got grabbed, pulled under ground, and eaten...


Another time I had a player show up late to a session, so I told him his character runs up to the tower was investigating a few minutes after they got there. Quick note on this character, he is blind so I had given him the scent ability to make him not be completely incompetent. So he knows very clearly the party has descended through a trap door to go investigate the dungeon under the tower. There is an older scent trail up the stairs in the middle of the room. So naturally he goes up those instead of following the party. He notices there is a door they clearly have no been thorugh up there... doesn't see the trap [woooo for natural ones as a rogue], and gets pretty fucked up by the trap. Seeing there was a good reason not to eb up there, he goes after the rest of the party. Finally! I think, now the party has it's trapbai... trap finder. Instead of following the party though, which he can clearly do with his scent ability and keen ears, he decides it would be brilliant to go the opposite way. Which leads to teh dungeon boss... which was a wizard... with a wand of dominate. Yes that was the end of that character.


With my group now I began to give a small amount of roleplay exp to reward those that were actually engaging in it (with us doing our sessions over skype/roll20 some felt they would be better served only fighting and never tlaking), and this has exploded into our time between sessions being filled with interparty roleplay in our skype group. Which was fine at the start, it led to the characters actually talking to one another about their backstory, and building rapport between them in their fight against our BBEG... however now it has degenerated into a few characters maneuvering to get their character's together in bed and doing little to nothnig in advancement of the plot. We just had the DC syndrome surface in the party's loot distribution, in party they decided on a system where they each get a free non-weapon and non-armor magic item per loot division, and the order of picking rotates so everyone gets a shot at having first pick and such. However in this last drop, since it was a dragon's hoard, there was a single item worth far more then the rest (amulet of nat armor +4, next highest cost magic item was 6k). Now this item is perfect for almost everyone, for who doesn't want natural armor? It went unclaimed until the end of the loot order, because they knew that they would have much lower priority in the loot distribution next time, if they got a turn (dependent on the value of the next loot drop)... foolish players 

The Hellknight Prestige class's flavor did call out to me I'll send some thoughts over once I'm no longer at school/in meetings today

Haven't read through the entire thread yet, but wonderful idea!

When I first started I fell into the trap of "Teh Tatooed Monk is teh OP and breaks teh game  " However after building a semi competent fighter for their first encounter... not so much  Now my players and I have an agreement, anything they want to use I have available to me. So they avoid any true game breaking mechanics to prevent the BBEG from getting comparable game shattering power.

My personal repository of extra knowledge:

Dresden Files
Godspeaker Trilogy
Legend of the Five Rings (Yes I know they have a d20 implementation for it now, and a well fleshed d10 system, but I first started pulling ideas before I saw those, and I like my ideas better )
Starcraft
Fallout series
Real world mythos

An amusing thought I've always had would be to have a telepathic NPC/Enemy/BBEG use telepathy to poke around in character's heads whilst they sleep, prolonged intimidate type thing, or attempt to condition them to fear him/be subservient/eat only goat's cheese or so forth.

Something like a long term Pavlovian conditioning

Even though it is simple to avoid in many cases, I love oozes and gelatinous cubes

One of the ways I've had fun surprising players is have the environment itself be an enemy, and yes this includes natural creatures in it I had dire elk try to bull rush the party off a cliff, a pit trap which contained quicksand instead of it's regular X-ft drop, magnetic rocks (also fun with magnetic armor ) with a variable reflex DC to avoid having the weapon (metal ones of course) being stuck to it depending on the strength of the field/player level, storms and natural disasters can be fun on occasion.

What a lovely concept  Once I'm at a place not at work I'll dig up some of the zerg creations that I've made, those things were very exciting... and kinda deadly

Are 3.5 Epic Spells good?  Or am I better off branching into prestige classes?

Depends, are you the only one casting them? Or will you have (arbitrarily high number of solars, bound casters, leadership followers etc) lower the spellcraft DC? By that level you should easily have several thousand followers without any severe optimization, so thats several thousand off the DC even if they only contribute a first level spell. Make the spells permanent (or of arbitrarily long duration), you are invincible, surrounded by fields doing arbitrarily high damage at will, etc. I did this as an example for a friend who thought his half celestial/half fiend monk/splatbook prestige classes was invincible (couldnt do shit damage wise, but had an AC of several hundred, and ridiculously superbuffed saves). There are plenty of ways to supermax skill checks (item familiar, items that grant skill focus, epic skill focus, etc) to get you to be able to cast halfway decent epic spells, mayhaps not the game breakers  but solid enough.

Your best bet would be to first PrC out the ass in the regular 20 levels (so that you get the best saves, since above level 20 its a +1 epic bonus every other level), and then metamagic the living balls out of everything. Figure out your top 2 or 3 spells, and take arcane thesis, incantrix, etc, as well as perhaps the automatic application, and definitely the multiple quickened spells.

Get yourself permanently polymorphed into a Beholder and beholder mage, get some UR-Priest, etc. The options are pretty damn limitless.