Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Fuzzy_logic]

Again, guys, this is an argument about Psionics, not magic. We all know that magic is more powerful than psionics. That is, in fact, the only reason you would want to play with psionics.

The real question here is whether a Slayer can fight level-appropriate enemies. I'll confess that I haven't studied it carefully, but I think that the answer is probably "yes" once you have enough slayer levels. The end-loaded nature of it is a problem, but trading 1 ML and two feats for 5 BAB, 20 Skill Points, 30 hit points, and some class features is reasonable.

And seriously, don't discount the skill points. Every campaign I've played in have nasty thigns jump out at us regularly until the PCs get high enough level to scry-and-die. Slayers get Spot and Listen, so if you aren't a seer, you just went from being surprised to not being surprised. Assuming half your encounters are ambushes and they last 4 rounds each, your character is 10% more powerful just by having those skills.

[Cielingcat]

1188956803[/unixtime]](seriously, I'd really like to see someone claim that any Tome class is a cleric/wizard's equal)

Read the Races of War thread over on WotC.

[Bigode]

1188959650[/unixtime]]

1188956803[/unixtime]](seriously, I'd really like to see someone claim that any Tome class is a cleric/wizard's equal)

Read the Races of War thread over on WotC.

Sorry. Should've said "someone with active brain cells".

[Cielingcat]

Ah, sorry then, no one has done so.

[Lago_AM3P]

3.5 psionics, actually, is composed of 2 books (since the standard comparisons are between official material, I'll ignore the fact that Dreamscarred Press' material's better than Complete Nerf for the sake of this discussion); the problem with trying to have the same discussion about magic is that the latter's crack that anybody has to take for all their lives if they ever did, as there's absolutely damn nothing in D&D that compares to full spellcasting (seriously, I'd really like to see someone claim that any Tome class is a cleric/wizard's equal); the only things that compare against spells are, well, other spells.

But you're still fucking forcing the DM and the PCs to read two more books and add new mechanics that don't necessarily add much to the game.

Seriously, since most other sourcebooks build off of core, if you just want a few feats or spells or a PrC, it's not that much work to integrate it into the game. Psionics demands that people understand the ins and outs of an entire new spell list and power system.

Psionics, like Tome of Battle, is an inherently selfish system. Unlike Tome of Battle it's a poor mechanic nor is there any pressing need to put it into the game.

Seriously, we need to put all of these books in a pile then burn them. Barring that, I'm okay with completely marginalizing any supporters of this goofy system.

No, you can't hear any of this idiocy from me - and please hold back on gratuitous insult. What you'll hear is the existance of divine power's bad design, and thus I don't feel obliged to take it into consideration in a discusion about how stuff could/should look like (remember, the point of mine that started this was simply "one could make a class that loses MLs, maybe even CLs, and keeps level-appropriateness"; it wasn't even that such things necessarily exist now, but that they could exist).

I don't get this at all.

I can totally see where you're coming from when you say divine power is bad design.

But to hold this position while simultaneously trying to put psionics in your game... I don't understand it.

Divine Power is a bad spell, true, but it's been around basically unchanged since 3.0E game around and it's also in the core book. I've heard DMs bitch about it when I use it with divine metamagic but I've never had to talk to DMs about getting special permission to use divine power by itself.

This is in comparison to psionics, where the entire system is unmitigated crap and the majority of games won't even consider putting it in.

So, seriously, I'm not going to listen to any argument that tells me to ignore divine power while telling me to accept psionics wholesale. That dog won't hunt.

I'm not sure whether that'd be an honest suggestion, or some attempt at duping me into what you consider a retarded choice, but anyway: yes, you can, and I can answer "What if I want to have a powerset that isn't that of the bard, but that of the psion?"

First you're going to have to explain to me what is so special about the psion that we should include the power list in the first place.

Psion spellcasting is enough to push sword-based characters off of the range and make them irrelevant, which makes it already inherently unfair, but is still inferior to the established spellcasting system.

So by knowingly wanting to be a PsyWar or a Psion, you've already admitted that you want more power at the expense of the system but you don't have the balls to go whole hog on it. That's a really compelling argument to put it in the game.

Thanks for what I'm not looking for - the opportunity to smell like rotten milk. Also, that's not even serious cheese, as I'd have been able to do all that for myself - wanna hand me Pun-Pun too? More specifically, I tend to avoid talking about magic's balance because I don't think there's much of it at all, and I think the first person to say "eldritch knight" (wizard-based) instead of "slayer" (psion-based) was you; certainly, it wasn't me when talking with Frank bout surrendering MLs, or with Koumei about the supposed merits/flaws of psionics.

Okay, two things. The builds I posted aren't even serious cheese. The Sublime Chord PrC and Mystic Theurge 'trick' are supposed to work as intended. If you're calling that weaksauce paradigm cheese then I have no idea what I'm going to say to you.

Secondly, I was never talking to you. That entire block you just quoted? I was pointing out how amazingly shitty Eldritch Knights are. Then later, I'm pointing out how amazingly shitty psionics are.

Got it?

[Lago_AM3P]

The real question here is whether a Slayer can fight level-appropriate enemies. I'll confess that I haven't studied it carefully, but I think that the answer is probably "yes" once you have enough slayer levels. The end-loaded nature of it is a problem, but trading 1 ML and two feats for 5 BAB, 20 Skill Points, 30 hit points, and some class features is reasonable.

A Egotist Slayer is viable in the abstract but I still question why you'd bother.

You're already playing a character you know to be intentionally gimped. I mean, people have admitted that psionics is inferior to magic.

So why not just pick an intentionally gimped character that WORKS WITH THE CORE SYSTEM? You're being nicer to your DM by not making him read more books and force feeding him something he probably doesn't want to include in his game.

By the way, Tome of Battle forces the DM to sit down and read through the entire thing but I've never had problems getting the DM to let me use Book of Nine Swords crap. Most of the time the DM won't let me include psionics unless he already made a proviso for it. Take from that what you will.

[cthulhu]

1188960388[/unixtime]]Ah, sorry then, no one has done so.

Can I take the bait? I think with the current structure of feats (ie no RoW style feats for spelllcasters ^_^) RoW classes are actually probably pretty close to being almost as good maybe.

Ish.

At some levels.

Once you've banned polymorph.

It probably all goes to hell eventually once someone slams down something seriously broken, but I'm pretty sure a warrior can play the same game as a sorcerer. Till about level 11.

Almost certainly.

(Is that enough caveats to assure I am not killed by an enraged horde?)

[CalibronXXX]

1188964572[/unixtime]]

1188960388[/unixtime]]Ah, sorry then, no one has done so.

Can I take the bait? I think with the current structure of feats (ie no RoW style feats for spelllcasters ^_^) RoW classes are actually probably pretty close to being almost as good maybe.

Ish.

At some levels.

Once you've banned polymorph.

It probably all goes to hell eventually once someone slams down something seriously broken, but I'm pretty sure a warrior can play the same game as a sorcerer. Till about level 11.

Almost certainly.

(Is that enough caveats to assure I am not killed by an enraged horde?)

Oh I feel that a single classed Wizard, Druid, or Cleric are roughly on par with tome classes up until level 16 if you use all the mechanical alterations in the tomes. Especially if you count contingent spells from the Craft Contingent Spell feat and things like Simulacrum as counting towards your 8 magic item limit.

[Koumei]

And even if, sorry, even though they're not the equals of such classes simply due to the fact that casters can pull out some really crazy shit that has nothing to do with normal combat abilities, ToB classes are still playing the same game - they're still slapping up monsters that they're meant to be slapping up.

[Cielingcat]

Yeah, the argument that no one but an idiot makes is that the Tome classes are better than the non-limited magic classes. Limited magic classes being people like the Beguiler who, ignoring the fact that the Beguiler is crazy good, have a preset ability list and are therefore not by definition overpowered.

[Koumei]

The Beguiler is the kind of crazy good that doesn't make everyone else cry though - you actually have skill points, so you can enjoy doing that, and can even be the minesweeper if your DM has a hard-on for traps. You're also a full caster, and you can play battlefield control, non-lethal damage, save-or-suck specialist... similar to a wall mage, you can let the fighters think they're doing the winning (and occasionally bust out a Mass Hold or a Sleep when it's "your time to shine").

I'm a big fan of that class.

[RandomCasualty]

1188997164[/unixtime]]Yeah, the argument that no one but an idiot makes is that the Tome classes are better than the non-limited magic classes.

Well in most cases the RoW Fighter is going to be better than the majority of classes, unless they really cheese out.

You can beat out a RoW fighter with a cleric or wizard if you're someone like Frank, but for 99% of players, the RoW fighter is going to outperform a caster in combat ability. Mainly because it's just easier to play. You close to within foil action range, and then you basically win. The hard part is really getting within range, but once your'e there, you can pretty much beat down any 1on1 fight with nothing more than a sharpened stick.

Obviously, you're lacking as far as noncombat goes, and as a fighter, you always will. So it may well depend on the campaign too.

[Bigode]

But you're still fucking forcing the DM and the PCs to read two more books and add new mechanics that don't necessarily add much to the game.

Seriously, since most other sourcebooks build off of core, if you just want a few feats or spells or a PrC, it's not that much work to integrate it into the game. Psionics demands that people understand the ins and outs of an entire new spell list and power system.

It's all totally true for what people might call the average group, but:

a) I happen to be the GM;
b) there's just one other D&D GM (sorry, "DM" doesn't fly with me at all), and he likes most of psionics too;
c) aside from me and said GM, pretty much everyone else we play with fails to read anything at all (Touch attack? What's that?) about their characters or, woe betide, anything else, be it magic, psionics, the basic combat system, skills, whatever. In fact, that's why I'm considering handing most folks RoW barbarians and true fiends as-written in the same games where there'll be the classes I'm (re-)writing.

So, my group's divided between the 2 that read magic/psionics/incarnum/blade magic a long time ago, and think all of them introduce both great ideas and problems that we're more or less capable to fix (and, "strangely" enough, while none's really hard to fix, the hardest's magic, unless one accepts "ban tens of pages of spells" as an acceptable fix, which's what we're doing now), and the ones that haven't ever read anything at all; so, there's no learning curve issue going on with regards to my group.

As for what's added to the game, the issue's that, I'm not really up to snuff with D&D sourcebooks and thus don't know if mimicking the entirety of psionics is possible (certainly, a lot is); what I can say is that, as far as SRD material plus, say, the Complete series, psionics retains quite a lot of unique tricks.

Psionics, like Tome of Battle, is an inherently selfish system. Unlike Tome of Battle it's a poor mechanic nor is there any pressing need to put it into the game.

That it has no pressing need to add it (and that there is for blade magic) I completely agree. One issue that might be interesting to raise, though, is a difference in gameplay between psionics and magic, namely: even though the math behind the scenes might not be the best (and might even be worse than that behind magic), people that are actually playing and have themselves even a passing familiarity with math, in the experience of me and other people who talked about psionics, can picture their juice flowing out better than with the tiered spell system, and, even better, when someone fvcks up and does the wrong level-appropriate thing (read: makes a mistake on exactly what highest-level spell to use), a 1/day resource might be gone for the day even when talking about high-level people; a high-level psion fvcking up, OTOH, has a pile of PP left that they can convert to anything they happen to need next round. Thus, psionics' less punishing on newbies, if at least they know basic math (the ones who don't and are older than 12 should be killed anyway, considering we're talking about countries where basic education and libraries at all exist).

Seriously, we need to put all of these books in a pile then burn them. Barring that, I'm okay with completely marginalizing any supporters of this goofy system.

All of what books? I can certainly see you including the XPH and CP in the list (and not including ToB, I think), but did you mean any others specifically?

Divine Power is a bad spell, true, but it's been around basically unchanged since 3.0E game around and it's also in the core book. I've heard DMs bitch about it when I use it with divine metamagic but I've never had to talk to DMs about getting special permission to use divine power by itself.

This is in comparison to psionics, where the entire system is unmitigated crap and the majority of games won't even consider putting it in.

Part of that's already explained by we having all of 2 GMs that happen to like psionics, but, moreover: you should have to ask for permission to use divine power, and have it always negated. I don't even have a problem with tank/archer clerics; just with this specifically. So, I don't regard the fact that the most broken stuff is the one that's easier to have access to as particularly edifying.

So, seriously, I'm not going to listen to any argument that tells me to ignore divine power while telling me to accept psionics wholesale. That dog won't hunt.

That I can totally accept, but just one question: what do you mean by "wholesale"? You aren't thinking I find the entirety of psioncs' perfect and I consider everything in the XPH balanced, right? The paragraph below stands as proof of the contrary ... and whether all of psionics' crap I consider still hard to believe - one good thing I forgot to mention is the concept of psionic focus; your opinion?

Frank: mindfeeders are still pretty pimp (i.e. insane); I always make a point of coup de grace-ing a squirrel with my light pick every 10 min.

First you're going to have to explain to me what is so special about the psion that we should include the power list in the first place.

Not special as in "I wet my pants", but are you telling me the entirety of psionics' replicable with a PHB, or even Complete Arcane/Divine? I don't consider myself obliged to have a pile of sourcebooks, and don't consider the existance of the Spell Compendium a particularly good thing, considering there's no book of "options non-spellcasters can have without spending any sort of resource".

Psion spellcasting is enough to push sword-based characters off of the range and make them irrelevant, which makes it already inherently unfair, but is still inferior to the established spellcasting system.

So by knowingly wanting to be a PsyWar or a Psion, you've already admitted that you want more power at the expense of the system but you don't have the balls to go whole hog on it. That's a really compelling argument to put it in the game.

More power than a character based around blade magic or incarnum? I've long banned paladin, monk and company, based on "downward brokenness". And, actually, what I want is less power: I once played a druid, and the result wasn't pretty. Since then, I've never played anything stronger than a bard, and avoided using fascinate (Diplomacy doesn't count, since I'm not sure whether anybody uses it as written). On what to do for lazier players, see comment on Tome classes above ...

Okay, two things. The builds I posted aren't even serious cheese. The Sublime Chord PrC and Mystic Theurge 'trick' are supposed to work as intended. If you're calling that weaksauce paradigm cheese then I have no idea what I'm going to say to you.

What? Are you telling me the authors intended it to work as it does? If that's shown as having any substance, I'll lose even more respect for the WotC folks, which I didn't previously consider possible!

You're already playing a character you know to be intentionally gimped. I mean, people have admitted that psionics is inferior to magic.

So why not just pick an intentionally gimped character that WORKS WITH THE CORE SYSTEM? You're being nicer to your DM by not making him read more books and force feeding him something he probably doesn't want to include in his game.

By the way, Tome of Battle forces the DM to sit down and read through the entire thing but I've never had problems getting the DM to let me use Book of Nine Swords crap. Most of the time the DM won't let me include psionics unless he already made a proviso for it. Take from that what you will.

Well, the first 2 paragraphs should be explained in my case by this point. On the third: isn't there a pile of GMs who refuse ToB too? Also, while I do acknowledge that ToB's probably more popular, I won't take anything from that relative to the material's quality, simply because I see GMs ban material more for retarded reasons than anthing remotely sensical, and, while I'm paying close attention to your and Frank's objections, the truth's that stuff ends banned without even being read decently most of the time ("Cleric? Of course! You're supposed to be better than everyone else because you serve a deity FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD! - Warblade? FIGHTERS CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!" - do I need anything else as proof that people don't know what to ban/accept?).

Oh I feel that a single classed Wizard, Druid, or Cleric are roughly on par with tome classes up until level 16 if you use all the mechanical alterations in the tomes. Especially if you count contingent spells from the Craft Contingent Spell feat and things like Simulacrum as counting towards your 8 magic item limit.

Heh, that may be right. Something that used to make me worry, though, is whether that'd still hold true if spellcasters ever had their side of feats revised.

You can beat out a RoW fighter with a cleric or wizard if you're someone like Frank, but for 99% of players, the RoW fighter is going to outperform a caster in combat ability. Mainly because it's just easier to play. You close to within foil action range, and then you basically win. The hard part is really getting within range, but once your'e there, you can pretty much beat down any 1on1 fight with nothing more than a sharpened stick.

What? Fog, fog, fog, stacks of contingencies, instant-kills - how's that hard (or worse than a fighter for anything but a closet fight)? Besides, what about miracle and shades?

[erik]

1189027377[/unixtime]]Fog, fog, fog, stacks of contingencies, instant-kills - how's that hard (or worse than a fighter for anything but a closet fight)? Besides, what about miracle and shades?

How does stacks of contingencies work?

You can use only one contingency spell at a time; if a second is cast, the first one (if still active) is dispelled.

[the_taken]

Craft Contingent Spell [Item Creation]

[CalibronXXX]

Allows one contingent spell per caster level.

[cthulhu]

1189021363[/unixtime]]

1188997164[/unixtime]]Yeah, the argument that no one but an idiot makes is that the Tome classes are better than the non-limited magic classes.

Oh right. Yeah.. I'd probably disagree with that. Classes are punchy enough that players need to helm it over the line for power level stuff

Well in most cases the RoW Fighter is going to be better than the majority of classes, unless they really cheese out.

You can beat out a RoW fighter with a cleric or wizard if you're someone like Frank, but for 99% of players, the RoW fighter is going to outperform a caster in combat ability. Mainly because it's just easier to play. You close to within foil action range, and then you basically win. The hard part is really getting within range, but once your'e there, you can pretty much beat down any 1on1 fight with nothing more than a sharpened stick.

Obviously, you're lacking as far as noncombat goes, and as a fighter, you always will. So it may well depend on the campaign too.

Actually I'd disagree the RoW fighter is - in limited playtesting - still quite challenging to helm.

Now if you had of said barbarian instead of fighter then I'd agree with you. The RoW barbarian hits like a freight train no matter what you do.

Edit: And thus RoW barbarian is a god damn fantastic class as a DM because you can just slap it on some random bugbears or ogres or whatever and they are a real threat, have zero complexity and you can just charge around.

[RandomCasualty]

1189027377[/unixtime]]What? Fog, fog, fog, stacks of contingencies, instant-kills - how's that hard (or worse than a fighter for anything but a closet fight)? Besides, what about miracle and shades?

Well a lot of it is kind of hard because every spell doesn't work in every situation and you need to word your contingencies correctly for them to actually do much good. Contingencies are pretty awesome if they're set up correctly, but it's not always easy to set up ideal contingencies beforehand, when you don't' know what the battle is going to be.

I mean it doesn't take much forethought to just spam out save or dies, but that's not really going to put you ahead of the RoW fighter. To go ahead of the RoW fighter, you need some more advanced tactics.

Actually I'd disagree the RoW fighter is - in limited playtesting - still quite challenging to helm.

Sort of, but not really. I'd give it a moderate difficulty. The RoW fighter plays much like a blue control deck does in magic. You use foil action and improved delay and basically act to disrupt anything that you don't like. There's some complexity as to when and where to use his foils and delayed actions for maximum effect, but it's nowhere near as complicated as selecting contingencies or even just deciding what wizard spell would be most optimal in the given situation.

The RoW fighter has a few gimmicks that you need to master and you need familiarity with the round structure, but that's about it.

[JonSetanta]

RoW fighter needs explosions. Lots of them.

[cthulhu]

1189062400[/unixtime]]

Sort of, but not really. I'd give it a moderate difficulty. The RoW fighter plays much like a blue control deck does in magic. You use foil action and improved delay and basically act to disrupt anything that you don't like. There's some complexity as to when and where to use his foils and delayed actions for maximum effect, but it's nowhere near as complicated as selecting contingencies or even just deciding what wizard spell would be most optimal in the given situation.

The RoW fighter has a few gimmicks that you need to master and you need familiarity with the round structure, but that's about it.

Actually the difficult curve starts about level 6 when you have lots of feats, 3 abilities each from all of them and lots of stuff to do. But yeah it's not super amazingly hard. But it is at least as hard as a sorcerer - not as hard as the classes with the bigger spell selections though. I wouldn;t give it to a new player.

Anyway YMMV.

[RandomCasualty]

1189073326[/unixtime]]
Actually the difficult curve starts about level 6 when you have lots of feats, 3 abilities each from all of them and lots of stuff to do. But yeah it's not super amazingly hard. But it is at least as hard as a sorcerer - not as hard as the classes with the bigger spell selections though. I wouldn;t give it to a new player.

Well, the main difference is that all your source material for the RoW fighter is in RoW. If you're playing a sorcerer, you've got to dumpster dive through lots and lots of different books to select spells.

The consolidation alone makes the RoW fighter much easier to handle conceptually.

[Cielingcat]

1189069456[/unixtime]]RoW fighter needs explosions. Lots of them.

Nah, Morphling.

[the_taken]

1189128179[/unixtime]]

1189069456[/unixtime]]RoW fighter needs explosions. Lots of them.

Nah, Morphling.

The ROW fighter needs the ability to morph into an explosion, and set himself on fire afterwards.

[Cielingcat]

[JonSetanta]

RoW fighter should Polymorph into a Living Spell (Meteor Swarm)