Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Rob_Knotts]

1186974796[/unixtime]]I imagine there are the few, the proud.

The conceited, the self-important:biggrin:

What I remember most about my time on the WotC boards is as much as anthing else, that experience helped established my overall disgust for every edition of D&D, past and present.

[Crissa]

Did they just spend a hundred posts arguing about Negates vs Immune (which are never described as being different in any D&D book)?

Argh. And none of us are there to say that while the Sage was oft wrong... He's actually got a pretty good line going here?

I mean, flavor wise you probably want Fortify to block Vorpal. But really, it doesn't say 'And it stops special effects that result on a roll of twenty' does it?

Argh.

Stupid arguments on both sides. ;-; 'Sage must be right!' 'Negate means something different!'

-Crissa

[Koumei]

Yes, they seriously did just spend a hundred odd posts arguing that. This makes baby Raptor Jesus cry.

[Leress]

1187053693[/unixtime]]Yes, they seriously did just spend a hundred odd posts arguing that. This makes baby Raptor Jesus cry.

It is right up there with "What makes the fighter sub-par?" thread.

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.ph ... br][br]The last few pages are really painful.

[Username17]

The Vorpal Sword thing hurt my head. If you're immune to a critical hit, the critical hit happens, and the critical does nothing to you. So additional things that trigger on a critical hit (such as fire damage, heads exploding, or additional attacks) still happen. If you Negate a critical hit, then the critical hit itself did not happen. Then triggered events don't go off.

The key issue here is not the Andy Collins ruled (correctly) that Vorpal Swords were trumped by Fortification Armors and then changed his mind on extremely flimsy pretense. The key issue is that Andy Collins actually fvcking [i[noticed[/i] that he over-nerfed Vorpal Swords in the rewrite so hard that they are unusable. And he actually noticed that this was a problem, and he's trying to dig himself out of the hole without actually admitting that the problem is the entire 3.5 DMG rewrite!

He changed the rules so that Vorpal Swords aren't worth having on he grounds that the only high level builds you ever saw that bothered swinging swords at all were based upon swinging crit-enhanced vorpal swords at people and he wanted people to swing axes and do damage instead. Well boo-fucking-hoo! It turns out that the reason people did that is because you can't possibly hope to accomplish jack or shit at 17th level against an adventuring party of evil Storm Giants with he pissant damage you do out of a fucking axe! All nerfing the only viable high level Fighter build did was make there not be any viable high level Fighter Builds. I could have told you that. In fact, I did.

Aargh. Stalth nerfs and "reinterpretations" piss me off.

---

The last few pages are really painful.

Hellz yeah they are. What the hell man? Gauntlets? What the hell is that supposed to prove? That the Fighter can beat some opponents if he drinks the right potions? Who would have thought?

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1187062237[/unixtime]]
He changed the rules so that Vorpal Swords aren't worth having on he grounds that the only high level builds you ever saw that bothered swinging swords at all were based upon swinging crit-enhanced vorpal swords at people and he wanted people to swing axes and do damage instead. Well boo-fucking-hoo! It turns out that the reason people did that is because you can't possibly hope to accomplish jack or shit at 17th level against an adventuring party of evil Storm Giants with he pissant damage you do out of a fucking axe! All nerfing the only viable high level Fighter build did was make there not be any viable high level Fighter Builds. I could have told you that. In fact, I did.

I never really though the problem was the 3.5 DMG rewrite, I always thought the problem was that high level combat was so broken to begin wtih. Rocket launcher tag isn't feasable when you're talking about high level beings.

I mean fuck, your DM takes an hour or two per NPC at those levels. They should not drop in one shot. Fighting a big high level opponent should be a drawn out fight. It's one of the reasons nobody bothers with high level now. Way too much prep work for a 1-2 round fight.

Survivability of an NPC has to be proportional to the work you put into making that NPC. Otherwise the game isn't even playable.

[Crissa]

Yeah, but Frank, none of the things say 'on a crit' anymore, they say 'when you roll a twenty' instead - which means you can't buff them by buffing your crit rate, either.

Which seems sorta okay, if you're into that sorta thing. But it does mean that crit immunity and negation no longer apply to the effects, which is a reasonable way around it.

But the bigger problem is that 'damage' is useless when the wizard is slinging area effect save or die spells.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

1187072003[/unixtime]]
But the bigger problem is that 'damage' is useless when the wizard is slinging area effect save or die spells.

Or summoning other creatures to sling area effect SoDs for him, because he really is that lazy.

Yeah, the fighter could vorpalize his sword, shield, other sword, armour spikes, armour, boots, mustache and crotch, and it'd still do absolute jack. And it all could have been avoided if they made fighters useful past level 3.

[tzor]

To be honest, I thought the whole problem started when they removed "sharpness" out of the system. Sharpness was applied to other limbs but also included the head.

Vorpal really is a legacy of the old 1E days where rare random death was common. It seems out of place in 3E and it seems even more out of place as a common weapon enhancement.

[bitnine]

1187093423[/unixtime]]Vorpal really is a legacy of the old 1E days where rare random death was common. It seems out of place in 3E and it seems even more out of place as a common weapon enhancement.

Yeah. The Vorpal enchantment is utterly horrible in a bunch of different ways. I used it as an example that explored some of the horrible-ness that often gets overlooked because of the more obvious sucking:

The Vorpal Example

First off, this is mainly to examine the resource features that vorpal excellently represents - not to evaluate vorpal's effectiveness, or lack thereof. Actually, I will come to that later. But it is a great way to think about situational usefulness and its features and impact. I have heard from some DMs who fudged things so that their 'boss' encounter didn't end straight off from a vorpal hit - or they handed out less experience from a quickly ended fight in this manner. That's pretty rough, and here's a chunk of why:

That vorpal sword doesn't really provide a benefit so much as shift things. Every fight in which the vorpal feature did not activate was a little bit tougher. For the purposes of that encounter, your character was a +5 enchantment in the hole (or the wealth value thereof). You got hurt a little more, your enemies had a better chance of escaping, maybe a party member died - but its clear for the purposes of those encounters you would have been better served by at least 70,000 effectively allocated gp . I would imagine that you didn't get additional experience points for all of those battles, either. (You might as well count in here all the times that the vorpal enchantment activated when it didn't make a difference, either.)

So in a flash the vorpal ability expends in a nova all of its accrued benefit that is has gained by leeching your effectiveness over the course of the battles where it sucked. It explodes with the pent-up energy of a dozen battles of a +5 enchantment doing nothing productive. And maybe you move the game along a little more that session or get to get home a little earlier or somesuch.

I dunno, but it seems like this is a real bad deal. I mean, as a DM, encouraging randomly applying novas that can trivialize certain encounters doesn't seem particularly fun or good for game flow, and that's outside a balance concern. I mean, yeah, it can happen and a good DM can deal, but I dunno why you'd want to encourage it like that. And as a player, vorpal usually sorta sucks walnuts straight out of the shell. (I'm sure you can finesse a build that's dedicated to making 50 attacks for -1 damage to trigger the ability, but hows about discounting that as de minimis.) Plus I figure that a fight over so quickly might well have the DM insert a new encounter and/or retcon down the challenge of the old one. Ow - I do understand some of that in keeping the game running, but ain't it a bitch to get double slapped? I mean, I actually paid in a few different ways for a vorpal sword that isn't really worth it, and even when it finally worked it didn't really.

Vorpal is near the high end of situational abilities, with the added feature of having its situational usefulness be random. Its problems can be seen reflected in many others of its ilk to a much lesser extent. And its a great basis for comparison. While I think there probably are some situationally applying benefits that work, its handy to be able to look at many such abilities and realize that they are worse than vorpal. At least then you can realize that heavy cases shouldn't take up much feature space on a class level.

[Jacob_Orlove]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... [br]Scroll down to the game rule information. Highlight:

Life Points (Su): A person has only so many days to live on this world. Once their time among the living is up, nothing can stop the soul from moving on to the afterlife. A bio-mage can spend their remaining time of life in the future to produce magical effects today. This is done by using Life Points.

[Crissa]

Is that really a class that lets you commit suicide for power?

-Crissa

[Jacob_Orlove]

For serious it is! At level 20, you get the ability to EXPLODE AND DIE.

Edit! It may not have been clear that by "EXPLODE AND DIE" I actually meant "EXPLODE AND DIE":

Bio-Bomb (Sp): At 20th level, a bio-mage has learned to use the energy within him to detonate himself in a destructive & lethal explosion. As a standard action, a bio-mage can spend his entire remaining LP to release a deadly blast, centered on his own body. This attack deals damage to all within the blast radius equal to his remaining LP divided by 100. All of those caught within the explosion can make a successful Reflex save (DC15) for half damage. The size of this explosive effect is a 30’ radius, centered on the bio-mage. This attack is always fatal to the bio-mage, whose body is completely disintegrated, leaving absolutely no trace remaining. Since the body is utterly destroyed & completely spent of LP, resurrection of any sort is impossible.

[RandomCasualty]

Yeah, it's apparently permanent death too.. lol. That sucks.

I could see at 20th level if it's just normal death, because at that level, nobody cares and you can just go resurrect him. Dying is commonplace.

But permanent death? What the hell?

[Catharz]

Reincarnation would work fine.

[Rob_Knotts]

Gets better. Apparently having the EXPLODE AND DIE! power generally makes you harder to kill:

Regeneration [Special] [Epic]
• You regain some of the LP that you have lost.
• Prerequisite: Bio-mage only, Bio-Bomb ability
• Benefit: After resting for a full day, you can regain your class level × your Constitution modifier. This can be done as often as you wish, but it must be a full day’s rest. You may engage in light, non-strenuous travel or activity, but any combat or spellcasting prevents you from regaining LP that day. If you undergo complete bed rest (doing nothing for an entire day), you recover LP equal to (1.5 × your class level × your Constitution bonus, minimum 1). You cannot gain more LP than you started with at 1st level (your starting Constitution score × 5,000).

Is it just me or does Bio-Bomb seem like it would be perfect "tell the DM/group to fuck off and die" power when a player gets frustrated with the game?

And didn't WoW do this as an April Fool's joke?

[Cielingcat]

What Blizzard puts out as a joke, D&D players invent for real.

What the fuck?

[Rob_Knotts]

I gotta admit, I'd really like the chance to play a Pandaren...

[Manxome]

1187385664[/unixtime]]What Blizzard puts out as a joke, D&D players invent for real.

What the fuck?

No, no. The Blizzard version was an inherent abililty given to all members of the race, not a level 20 capstone ability, and so was completely overpowered. The biomage's ability isn't nearly so abusable.

[Crissa]

PS: People who are quoting from Wizards sites... They don't use UTF-8. So I don't have an effing clue what the characters are that are thrown into the text sometimes. Please replace whatever symbols they use with lower 128 symbols from your keyboard, if possible...

"×" is what? It's used like four times in the Regeneration text Rob quoted.

-Crissa

[Neeek]

It really seems more useful as a "Shapechange to Phoenix, explode and don't care." thing. Or with Magic Jar. Or both.

[Neeek]

1187389457[/unixtime]]

"×" is what? It's used like four times in the Regeneration text Rob quoted.

It's an "x". As in "multiplied by".

[RandomCasualty]

I like the fact that the max LP is 5000 x con score, that alone is great.

Talk about arbitrarily huge numbers for no point...

[Crissa]

* means 'multiplied' and that wasn't it. It wasn't even �E or �– or �~ from upper 128 (Latin-1 Supplement).

Grr.

-Crissa

[Voss]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... br]Chaotic = short attention span theater.