Author Topic: Discussion and Suggestion Thread  (Read 224340 times)

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #580 on: August 21, 2012, 11:20:36 AM »
Very, very cool change. Shameful that wild ascetic anchorite cannot pick Glimmering Moon circle. For me it doesn't make sense flavor-wise, because lycanthropy and madness are quite 'druidic'.

A good point.  My folly has been corrected.

Why?

Well, I never liked the ACF to begin with.  It felt like a rush job, and not a very interesting one at that.  Given the nature of the revisions, only the spellshape champion and the spellsage would be left with four ACFs, anyway.  I figured that I would just cut them down to three each, then write one more ACF for the anchorite, the impulse mage, and the savant.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #581 on: August 21, 2012, 11:31:50 AM »
I'm liking what I'm seeing so far.   :)

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #582 on: August 21, 2012, 05:08:15 PM »
Living spellshape and spellsage changes are up!

  • Living Spellshape
    • Spellshape Attack ability replaced with Spellshape Body.  Basically, instead of getting a spellshape attack for free, they now get a slightly altered Improved Unarmed Strike for free.  Much less useful, while still being appropriate flavor-wise.  I figure that they have a decent amount of immunities, they can eat a slight nerf.
  • Spellsage
    • Arcane knack ability completely revised.  It's now much more versatile, while also capping at a lower spell level and allowing you fewer spells per day.
    • Added detect magic and arcane sight class features.
    • Added spellgrace class feature.
    • Replaced the arcane expertise ability with arcane mastery.  A 20th-level spellsage can now ignore antimagic fields.  Nice to have, but situational enough that I don't feel it's a completely broken capstone.
  • Spellsage Alternative Class Features
    • Divine Gift now changes the new arcane knack to draw from the cleric spell list, rather than sorcerer/wizard.  Also trades detect magic and arcane sight for turn/rebuke undead and chastise outsiders.
    • The Arcane Mastery alternative class feature has been removed.
  • Feats
    • Arcane Talent has been removed.
  • Living Spellshape Spellsage
    • Dropped all the old abilities.  Now trades detect magic for rebuke spell, spellgrace for spell resistance, and arcane sight for command magic.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Bauglir

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #583 on: August 21, 2012, 08:17:38 PM »
As a heads up, Turn/Rebuke Undead is a definite step up in power for the Divine Gift ACF. The spell list change might make it a wash, but Turn/Rebuke attempts are used as fuel for so many awesome things that I feel like it might be a little too awesome a benefit. This is just sort of a hunch, so probably more opinions should be given.

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #584 on: August 21, 2012, 09:06:46 PM »
Hrm.  Any more opinions?  I really like those replacements, but I don't want to horribly unbalance anything.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #585 on: August 22, 2012, 12:20:58 AM »
Everyone wanted impulse mages to be more random, right?
  • Impulse Mage
    • New impulsive surge ability.  Rage-like in application, completely unpredictable in benefit
    • Adept's knack added at 2nd level.
    • Evasion moved to 4th level.  Replaced at 2nd level with slippery mind.  Uncanny dodge removed.
    • Quick to act now starts at level five.
    • Impulse ward removed.
    • Slip-shift replaced with abrupt step.
    • Blurred movements added to 10th level.
    • Improved evasion moved to 14th level.  Replaced at 12th level with unruly mind.  Improved uncanny dodge removed.
    • Spontaneous escape replaced with temporal instability.
    • Shape the unknown added at 19th level.
  • Impulse Mage Alternative Class Features
    • Arcane Meditation now replaces slippery mind, evasion, unruly mind, and improved evasion.
    • Dark Impulses now grants access to the three appropriate incantations at 1st, 7th, and 13th levels.
    • Prescient Mage removed.
    • Temporal Impulses removed.
    • Added Trance Mage, letting you trade your impulsive surge for something a little less random.
  • Feats
    • Impulsive Jaunt now requires abrupt step.
    • Impulsive Voyage now requires Impulsive Jaunt and impulsive surge 5/day.  One use of the ability now costs 500 feet from your daily abrupt step distance.
    • Obscuring Ward removed.
  • Cambian Impulse Mage
    • Dropped all the old abilities.  Now trades adept's knack for eclectic knowledge, evasion for indomitable soul, and quick to act for additional rerolls with the cambian lucky racial ability.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #586 on: August 22, 2012, 12:29:26 AM »
Hrm.  Any more opinions?  I really like those replacements, but I don't want to horribly unbalance anything.

I can't think of anything specifically overpowered when it comes to non-DMM turn undead powered feats but I've never done any real optimization with them.

Offline Bauglir

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #587 on: August 22, 2012, 02:09:41 AM »
It's not that it's terribly overpowered on its own (about the best thing you can do is fuel Devotion feats), but it's definitely a step up from detect magic.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #588 on: August 22, 2012, 08:50:44 AM »
Impulsive Tactics should have Impulsive Jaunt as a prerequisite, since it only functions while that feat is active.
Impulsive Voyage should have 500 feet of Abrupt Step as a prerequisite (or, at the very least, the Abrupt Step ability), since it only functions through using that resource.

Edit: I'm concerned about Impulsive Surge. It requires significant overhead (tracking uses per day and rounds remaining aren't a problem, but determining which attribute it applies to each round and recalculating each round is a killer), but gives a paltry bonus (At level 1, it's a +1 bonus, which is barely worth tracking). Further, it's a competence bonus, so by mid levels it will likely overlap with some of your existing bonuses some of the time.

1: Remove the typing. I don't see why it shouldn't stack. (And besides, competence? I'd have expected luck.)
2: Increase the bonus to be something worth tracking. That means a minimum of +3 or +4. Barbarian Rage is a consistent and dependable +2 to a wide range of statistics. This may be only a small part of a class (as opposed to the majority of it), but it's more limited at any given time and randomized to boot. Any bonuses it grants should be worth the effort spent worrying about them.

Also, you don't have to scale up the bonuses to crazy high values if you start with a higher baseline. You could just as easily make it apply to multiple attributes at once, and/or offer more attributes it could apply to when you do so.
« Last Edit: August 22, 2012, 01:24:04 PM by Garryl »

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #589 on: August 22, 2012, 02:27:47 PM »
Impulsive Tactics should have Impulsive Jaunt as a prerequisite, since it only functions while that feat is active.
Impulsive Voyage should have 500 feet of Abrupt Step as a prerequisite (or, at the very least, the Abrupt Step ability), since it only functions through using that resource.

Done and done.  I guess I sort of assumed that having a prerequisite that required the other prerequisite was enough, but I suspect there are shenanigans that can break such assumptions.  Similarly, with Impulsive Voyage, I assumed that an impulse mage would have a Charisma score of at least 18 by 16th level, but--again--I wouldn't be surprised if something could break that.

Edit: I'm concerned about Impulsive Surge. It requires significant overhead (tracking uses per day and rounds remaining aren't a problem, but determining which attribute it applies to each round and recalculating each round is a killer), but gives a paltry bonus (At level 1, it's a +1 bonus, which is barely worth tracking). Further, it's a competence bonus, so by mid levels it will likely overlap with some of your existing bonuses some of the time.

1: Remove the typing. I don't see why it shouldn't stack. (And besides, competence? I'd have expected luck.)
2: Increase the bonus to be something worth tracking. That means a minimum of +3 or +4. Barbarian Rage is a consistent and dependable +2 to a wide range of statistics. This may be only a small part of a class (as opposed to the majority of it), but it's more limited at any given time and randomized to boot. Any bonuses it grants should be worth the effort spent worrying about them.

Also, you don't have to scale up the bonuses to crazy high values if you start with a higher baseline. You could just as easily make it apply to multiple attributes at once, and/or offer more attributes it could apply to when you do so.

Well, I removed the typing for now, but I think you're right.  The ability seemed fun and random when I wrote it, but it does look like kind of a pain in the ass now.  I'm thinking I'll drop the random component, which seems to be the main problem, and switch it to +2 to formula save DCs, +2 on saving throws, -2 to Armor Class.  The bonuses will scale up to +3 at 11th level, and to +4 at 20th level.

I'll probably need to revise Trance Mage as a result, but that's honestly less important than having a core class that works.

Thoughts?
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Garryl

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #590 on: August 22, 2012, 02:41:24 PM »
Aw. I kinda liked the random rage thing idea. Maybe as an ACF?
Just hulking up to get more powerful formulae doesn't feel very impulsey to me. Maybe let you reshuffle your occurred formulae a few times per day or something? I know you want something fun to go alongside your formulae at level 1, though, so that might not be quite enough. /shrug

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #591 on: August 22, 2012, 02:50:02 PM »
Aw. I kinda liked the random rage thing idea. Maybe as an ACF?

Yeah, I kind of do, too.  I think I read too much into "requiring significant overhead" as the main problem.  Scratch the last idea, we'll keep something random.

I'm not yet sure what, of course, but something.  Today's the last day of my internship, so I'll have a lot of time in the coming weeks to ponder the new face of impulsive surge.

Just hulking up to get more powerful formulae doesn't feel very impulsey to me. Maybe let you reshuffle your occurred formulae a few times per day or something? I know you want something fun to go alongside your formulae at level 1, though, so that might not be quite enough. /shrug

Well, technically, impulse mages already have a limited capacity to reshuffle their occurred formulae  Like pretty much everyone, they can take a swift action once per encounter to change their prepared formulae.  Everyone else expends all of their prepared formulae when they do this, but--given the impulse mage mechanic--I figured it was just easier to reshuffle.  It's basically what would happen, anyway.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Garryl

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #592 on: August 22, 2012, 02:55:40 PM »
Well, technically, impulse mages already have a limited capacity to reshuffle their occurred formulae  Like pretty much everyone, they can take a swift action once per encounter to change their prepared formulae.  Everyone else expends all of their prepared formulae when they do this, but--given the impulse mage mechanic--I figured it was just easier to reshuffle.  It's basically what would happen, anyway.

I thought you got rid of that?

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #593 on: August 22, 2012, 03:05:10 PM »
I decided not to flat-out remove it, since there are some more situational formulae.  Look at the Crushing Stone formulae that let you knock a flying creature to the ground.  You won't want to bother with those unless you think you're going to be facing a flyer--but, if you're surprised, it's nice to be able to adapt.

What I did was change them.  Before the change, repreparing your formulae during combat allowed you to recover them, in line with the rulings I've heard for Adaptive Style.  That was what ended up being a problem--you could circumvent your class's recovery mechanic once per encounter, meaning that you might never have to deal with it at all.  Now, however, repreparing your formulae leaves them all expended.  You can still adapt to changes, but it requires interaction with your recovery mechanic.  This is less of a problem for certain classes--a spellshape champion can reprepare her formulae and then immediately recover them all with a move action.  On the other hand, an elemental adept has to take a swift action on his next turn and can't shape any formulae that round.  The difficulty of recovery for an anchorite is variable, depending on how the prepared formulae are distributed.

Since an impulse mage automatically reshuffles her formulae whenever there are no more repressed formulae that can occur to her, it wasn't really worth changing--expending all of an impulse mage's formulae is effectively the same thing as reshuffling them.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #594 on: August 22, 2012, 03:46:35 PM »
Minor tweak I came up with, based on the fact that four attributes give us six combinations.  Thoughts?

(click to show/hide)

Edit: Oh, I also replaced the Freedom of the Storm incantation with Wrath of the Storm.  For those adventurers who are worried about the government listening in on their phone calls.

Edit Edit: Also replaced Corrosive Touch with Corrosive Investiture.  An interesting ability that is only a combat buff if your DM is (for some reason) attacking you with non-magical metal weapons after 7th level.  Are there DMs that do that?  I honestly don't know--I've usually moved on to either magical or non-metal weapons by that point.

Edit Edit Edit: Went with the version of Impulsive Surge that is spoilered above.  Now, to figure out the new savant ACF and masked one savant racial substitution levels.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2012, 01:23:04 AM by DonQuixote »
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline pppp

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #595 on: August 25, 2012, 12:37:40 PM »
Soulbound Companion Anchorite should have the Handle Animal skill added to skill list (maybe Ride too).

Is the fine art of riding forbidden to spellshapers? Because any of base classes have this skill as class skill.

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #596 on: August 26, 2012, 01:15:23 AM »
Soulbound Companion Anchorite should have the Handle Animal skill added to skill list (maybe Ride too).

Done.  It's now a 1st level ACF, to add the class skills early.

Is the fine art of riding forbidden to spellshapers? Because any of base classes have this skill as class skill.

Well, spellshapers already have pretty big skill lists for magic-users.  I figured Ride doesn't come up terribly often.  It's also one of the skills that I frequently forget about the existence of.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline pppp

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #597 on: August 26, 2012, 08:21:43 AM »

Done.  It's now a 1st level ACF, to add the class skills early.

Big thanks! This change would drastically improve my PC.

Well, spellshapers already have pretty big skill lists for magic-users.  I figured Ride doesn't come up terribly often.  It's also one of the skills that I frequently forget about the existence of.
Yes, it's true, but actually a Spellshape Champion with his knight-like feel could also get it.

After playing as an Anchorite for a while, I have few thoughts about equality of numens. First of all, I understand that complete balance is both impossible and unnecessary. On the other hand, the Crushing Stone numen quickly becomes very obsolete. DR 1/- for entire party is nice at first level, but DR 5/- at 20th level is likely ignorable.

The Natural Balance numen is a completely different case. Fast Healing 2 at first level is a bit too strong. I recommend to tune in down to Fast Healing 1. It would be still miraculous out-of-battle heal, but less powerful as the passive healing during an encounter.

Offline DonQuixote

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #598 on: August 27, 2012, 03:54:10 AM »
Big thanks! This change would drastically improve my PC.

I live to serve.

Yes, it's true, but actually a Spellshape Champion with his knight-like feel could also get it.

Not a bad point.  I'll consider it.

After playing as an Anchorite for a while, I have few thoughts about equality of numens. First of all, I understand that complete balance is both impossible and unnecessary. On the other hand, the Crushing Stone numen quickly becomes very obsolete. DR 1/- for entire party is nice at first level, but DR 5/- at 20th level is likely ignorable.

The Natural Balance numen is a completely different case. Fast Healing 2 at first level is a bit too strong. I recommend to tune in down to Fast Healing 1. It would be still miraculous out-of-battle heal, but less powerful as the passive healing during an encounter.

Changed 'em both.  Natural Balance now starts at fast healing 1, increasing by one for every five shaper levels you have, maxing out at fast healing 5 at 20th level.  Crushing Stone still starts at DR 1/-, but it increases by 1 for every two shaper levels you have, hitting DR 11/- at 20th level.  I wish there were a way to scale it just to DR 10/-, but such is life.
“Hast thou not felt in forest gloom, as gloaming falls on dark-some dells, when comes a whisper, hum and hiss; savage growling sounds a-near, dazzling flashes around thee flicker, whirring waxes and fills thine ears: has thou not felt then grisly horrors that grip thee and hold thee?”

Offline Garryl

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Re: Discussion and Suggestion Thread
« Reply #599 on: August 27, 2012, 07:33:38 AM »
DR 2/-, increasing by 2 every 5 levels gives DR 10/- at level 20. It also keeps the every 5 levels scaling factor that most other numens have.