Sounds oxymoronic to me.Torko wrote: benevolent Christian God
Did anyone review the BoVD here? I seem to recall it being mentioned somewhere but searches don't seem to help.
OSSR: Book of Exalted Deeds
Moderator: Moderators
-
Silent Wayfarer
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 898
- Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:35 am
-
Ted the Flayer
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 846
- Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2012 3:24 pm
BoVD had some really stupid moments, but in some ways it was quite good and had lots of stuff for the DM to plunder.
YMMV, of course. But I kind of like the BoVD.
YMMV, of course. But I kind of like the BoVD.
Prak Anima wrote:Um, Frank, I believe you're missing the fact that the game is glorified spank material/foreplay.
Frank Trollman wrote:I don't think that is any excuse for a game to have bad mechanics.
-
OgreBattle
- King
- Posts: 6820
- Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:33 am
I really enjoy reading the old testament though and their idea of absolute morality, that's why they make such great antagonists in so many East Asian stories. That would've been an awesome Book of Exalted Light. Don't call it good, call it the LIGHT.Torko wrote:I would immediately believe in a benevolent Christian God if He incinerated any writer who forgets that theology and ethics in RPGland is different from medieval Christianity.
oh another setting with an angel cult: ACTRAISER. In that case the angel is you, and you are a genuinely good being who risks his life in incredibly grueling battles to make the world better, and all of your angels believe in your cause and will give their lives for it. You are truly Exalted Goodness.
Shin Megami Tensei alone is probably enough to convince me that angel cults can work. Which is good, because Almost none of the other examples work. Worshipping something identified as a god or goddess doesn't count. D&D already had gods, and PrCs for their servants, and people actually did play devotees of Pelor and even take Pelor-themed classes. I've seen it happened. BOED was weird because it asked you to imagine that your heroes choose to ignore the actual gods of good, who demonstrably exist in the setting, in order to hang with their flunkies on some backwater plane. So FFXI, for instance, is out. So are most of the real-world examples except maybe the Knights Templar, who were probably accused of contacting angels at some point.
The Church of Yevon from FFX is not an angel cult, it's an ancestor cult. If I were feeling glib I would point out that this is exactly what it says on the tin: Yevon was, in fact, just an old dude. But to be more serious, I think the key point about angels is that they aren't human and never were, come from another world, usually predate humans and generally don't understand humans very well. Literally everyone in FFX is a human or an ex-human, and the church is mostly run by ghosts who impersonate living people.
I'm not familiar with FFXIII. Are the L'Cie of Cocoon believed to have created the world, or humanity? Because if so, they're gods, not angels. If not, that may be another valid instance. Drifters, meanwhile, appears to feature a cult of a prophet and perhaps a god, but that's not the same thing as angels.
The Church of Yevon from FFX is not an angel cult, it's an ancestor cult. If I were feeling glib I would point out that this is exactly what it says on the tin: Yevon was, in fact, just an old dude. But to be more serious, I think the key point about angels is that they aren't human and never were, come from another world, usually predate humans and generally don't understand humans very well. Literally everyone in FFX is a human or an ex-human, and the church is mostly run by ghosts who impersonate living people.
I'm not familiar with FFXIII. Are the L'Cie of Cocoon believed to have created the world, or humanity? Because if so, they're gods, not angels. If not, that may be another valid instance. Drifters, meanwhile, appears to feature a cult of a prophet and perhaps a god, but that's not the same thing as angels.
Yeah, the Brick Testament's stuff for the Old Testament remains one of my favorite online reads
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
-
OgreBattle
- King
- Posts: 6820
- Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:33 am
The L'Cie of Cocoon were formed by the world creator to keep order in the world and perform certain tasks. A disagreement with the L'Cie of Pulse lead to a big war breaking out as they both have different ideas of what their orders were meant to be. So it's two groups of angels fighting each other as they follow their absolute orders from the divine creator who is absent.Orion wrote: I'm not familiar with FFXIII. Are the L'Cie of Cocoon believed to have created the world, or humanity? Because if so, they're gods, not angels. If not, that may be another valid instance. Drifters, meanwhile, appears to feature a cult of a prophet and perhaps a god, but that's not the same thing as angels.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Chapter 6: Magic
It really wouldn't be a splat book if they didn't devote an entire chapter to powerups that only Casters can use, and divine casters get for free, thereby widening the gap between war gods clerics and hobos fighters. And so here we have an entire chapter dedicated to increasing the rift between the have classes and the have not classes. Almost everything in this chapter is bullshit flavored bullshit, which simply means that it doesn't widen the income disparity very much.
Not to be outdone in stupid, the book opens by telling you what a [Good] spell is, and that list is just the definition of [Evil] spell from the Book of Vile Darkness with everything flipped backwards. Then it tries to come up with an answer for how [Healing] spells don't get the [Good] tag even though they manifestly "alleviate suffering". This isn't even the dumbest part though. By flipping the definition of [Evil] spells from being "cause undue suffering" to [Good] spells that "alleviate suffering" they signed themselves up for the comparison of contagion (which is [Evil] according to the poorly thought out definitions in the BoVD) to remove disease, which is of course literally exactly the opposite spell. And doom to bless for that matter. Now the Book of Exalted Deeds holds back from that and only adds the [Good] descriptor to great joy and shield other which are both spells that no one ever casts. That's good for the game, because it doesn't fuck everything over like when Book of Vile Darkness made desecrate uncastable by Good Clerics and required errata to consecrate to keep Good from being incapable of desanctifying Evil temples. But it's bad for consistency in that having just given you a completely stupid definition of what constitutes a [Good] spell they then immediately walk that back by essentially admitting that they can't actually enforce it because the forces of Evil still need access to healing in order to compete in D&D land. It's pathetic.
Second, they bring in spells that are exactly like Corrupt spells from BoVD except that they are [Good] instead of [Evil]. The term they come up for this is "Sanctified". This is weird and annoying because of course "sanctified" means "to have been made holy" while "corrupted" means "immoral, depraved, or evil". And the fact that the authors clearly believe these two words to be opposites is really lame. Fucking fuck, there are gods of Evil in D&D. Really. Still. But regardless of that, having already established that having your spell draw its power from the mental and physical well-being of the caster is wicked and depraved, trying to pass off sacrificing your mental and physical well-being to power the spell as an act of goodness is just really hard to take. It's exactly the same fucking thing. The only thing that makes these different from Corrupt spells is that Clerics get to cast them without even preparing them in advance, which would be a significant advantage to the already overpowered Cleric class if there was ever a reason to cast these fucking things.
The book introduces some new domains for the new gods you don't give an actual shit about and doesn't even attempt to tie them in to the gods that actually exist in established campaign worlds. Ironically, doom is the first level spell for one of these new special "good" domains (the "Wrath" domain of Kharash, who as previously noted isn't actually even a god). And in the BoVD, it tells you that casting that spell is an evil act. It's like they can't be fucked to read their own bullshit. I don't know why they expect me to.
Much of the new spells are bullshit from both a mechanical and conceptual standpoint. The very first spell in the list is the one where you turn people you hate into frustrated sex slaves while they slowly die. That is called "Affliction" and it is a [Good] spell. Seriously, WTF? A bunch of the spells are reprints, although often as not there is serious functionality loss that harms the game. For example: Aspect of the Deity is back, but only the [Good] version is listed, which doesn't save a lot of space but does make the spell useful to a lot less characters and reinforces the "Gods == Good" bullshit that the authors keep falling into.
Many of the spells do extremely insignificant damage, often with incredible costs. There is a 9th level spell where you murder yourself to inflict your hit points plus 50 damage to Evil creatures in a 40 foot burst. This is a 9th level fucking spell, and would almost never be worth casting even if it was a cantrip. Even most of the buffs are actually terrible. The one that gets the most people fapping over it is luminous armor, which is a 2nd level spell that adds 5 to your AC and gives a -4 penalty to enemies making melee attacks against you. People flip out about how that's a 9 point AC shift and basically the entire RNG. But it grants an armor bonus, which means it doesn't stack with fuckall. And so what you're really getting is like 1 more AC and less perks than having mage armor and shield for two 2nd level spell slots (since you have to cast a lesser restoration to clean up the sacrifice cost of this piece of shit). Which is another thing: how much of a "sacrifice" is it to have to cast lesser restoration? The whole concept is based around personal sacrifice, but it's just a 2nd level spell slot and it doesn't even have to come from you.
There are some incredibly tortured wordings in here. Heavenly lightning does electricity damage that ignores electricity immunity and it ignores electricity resistance that was granted by magic. But if you're naturally electricity resistant (but not naturally resistant enough to count as immune, I guess?) it seems to be reduced normally. Why? Why can't it just do untyped magical damage? But it's also a 5th level spell with short range that only does 3 dice of damage, which means no one will ever cast it. Ever.
There are some spells that fucking kill people. They are marred by being poorly worded and conceived. Blinding Beauty makes all humanoids within 60 feet who can see you save against permanent blindness, and you can do that again every round for the rest of combat, which means that for all the difference it makes it may as well be mass blindness no save for everyone in range (since they have to close their eyes for the rest of the fight to avoid having to save against blindness every round). But that spell has, and I am not making this up: an Abstinence Component, which is that you are not allowed to have sex for a week before you cast it. Also, this is a Druid spell, which means that under most circumstances you will cast it after having charged into battle transformed into a giant octopus. So by being a sexually frustrated giant octopus you become so sexually attractive that all your enemies are blinded. It's... not good. I mean, it's very powerful. But it's stupid. Also, this has the [Good] tag and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
The whole Abstinence component is a thing here. There are some where you aren't allowed to eat or whatever. They aren't all only about abstaining from sex. I still actually have no idea what is supposed to be especially Good about not doing stuff that is healthy and entertaining. The sex one is probably the weirdest though, since bringing joy to people is explicitly [Good] and very few of my sexual encounters have involved the other person crying afterwards.
Some of the shit they do to power up conjurers is just weird. There's a [Good] version of those spells from the BoVD where you conjure up some Dretch servants or whatever. But get this: the hit die limit for demonic servants is separate and cumulative with the hit die limit for celestial servants. It's like they never even considered that maybe you'd just collect the whole set and have a demon squad, a guardinal squad, a skeleton squad and so on and so forth because you're a fucking Wizard and you don't have to worry about whether individual spells are [Good] or [Evil]. All those mini-army limits should have stacked. I mean, hit dice is still an incredibly worthless way to attempt to control minion squad size (as hit dice have only a loose correlation with monster level, and monster power does not rise linearly with level). But giving people separate minion pools for every minion generating spell just makes open mockery of having limits at all.
The chapter has a bunch of fiddly text in it. It's 38 pages long, and a chore to get through because none of the names convey any real information about what the spells do because they are apparently named by drawing pieces of Christian imagery from a hat. I mean, exalted fury and warcry are attack spells and not buffs. The mini-descriptions at the beginning of the chapter are less than useless. For example, you might get really excited when you see radiant fog on the Wizard list and it notes that it is like solid fog but dazzles or blinds. And you're be like Holy Shit That's Awesome. But the actual spell is like solid fog but allows spell resistance to negate the movement hampering effects (thus making it nothing at all like solid fog) and the blinding effect only happens to light sensitive enemies (which is a very short list of enemies once you get past Orcs and Drow, and Drow have SR). Also: no one cares about dazzling enemies who fail a save, because that is literally just -1 to their attack rolls.
Anyway, I give this chapter a D-. There is some stuff in there that people would actually use, but most of that is just reprints from Defenders of the Faith.
-Username17
It really wouldn't be a splat book if they didn't devote an entire chapter to powerups that only Casters can use, and divine casters get for free, thereby widening the gap between war gods clerics and hobos fighters. And so here we have an entire chapter dedicated to increasing the rift between the have classes and the have not classes. Almost everything in this chapter is bullshit flavored bullshit, which simply means that it doesn't widen the income disparity very much.
Not to be outdone in stupid, the book opens by telling you what a [Good] spell is, and that list is just the definition of [Evil] spell from the Book of Vile Darkness with everything flipped backwards. Then it tries to come up with an answer for how [Healing] spells don't get the [Good] tag even though they manifestly "alleviate suffering". This isn't even the dumbest part though. By flipping the definition of [Evil] spells from being "cause undue suffering" to [Good] spells that "alleviate suffering" they signed themselves up for the comparison of contagion (which is [Evil] according to the poorly thought out definitions in the BoVD) to remove disease, which is of course literally exactly the opposite spell. And doom to bless for that matter. Now the Book of Exalted Deeds holds back from that and only adds the [Good] descriptor to great joy and shield other which are both spells that no one ever casts. That's good for the game, because it doesn't fuck everything over like when Book of Vile Darkness made desecrate uncastable by Good Clerics and required errata to consecrate to keep Good from being incapable of desanctifying Evil temples. But it's bad for consistency in that having just given you a completely stupid definition of what constitutes a [Good] spell they then immediately walk that back by essentially admitting that they can't actually enforce it because the forces of Evil still need access to healing in order to compete in D&D land. It's pathetic.
Second, they bring in spells that are exactly like Corrupt spells from BoVD except that they are [Good] instead of [Evil]. The term they come up for this is "Sanctified". This is weird and annoying because of course "sanctified" means "to have been made holy" while "corrupted" means "immoral, depraved, or evil". And the fact that the authors clearly believe these two words to be opposites is really lame. Fucking fuck, there are gods of Evil in D&D. Really. Still. But regardless of that, having already established that having your spell draw its power from the mental and physical well-being of the caster is wicked and depraved, trying to pass off sacrificing your mental and physical well-being to power the spell as an act of goodness is just really hard to take. It's exactly the same fucking thing. The only thing that makes these different from Corrupt spells is that Clerics get to cast them without even preparing them in advance, which would be a significant advantage to the already overpowered Cleric class if there was ever a reason to cast these fucking things.
The book introduces some new domains for the new gods you don't give an actual shit about and doesn't even attempt to tie them in to the gods that actually exist in established campaign worlds. Ironically, doom is the first level spell for one of these new special "good" domains (the "Wrath" domain of Kharash, who as previously noted isn't actually even a god). And in the BoVD, it tells you that casting that spell is an evil act. It's like they can't be fucked to read their own bullshit. I don't know why they expect me to.
Much of the new spells are bullshit from both a mechanical and conceptual standpoint. The very first spell in the list is the one where you turn people you hate into frustrated sex slaves while they slowly die. That is called "Affliction" and it is a [Good] spell. Seriously, WTF? A bunch of the spells are reprints, although often as not there is serious functionality loss that harms the game. For example: Aspect of the Deity is back, but only the [Good] version is listed, which doesn't save a lot of space but does make the spell useful to a lot less characters and reinforces the "Gods == Good" bullshit that the authors keep falling into.
Many of the spells do extremely insignificant damage, often with incredible costs. There is a 9th level spell where you murder yourself to inflict your hit points plus 50 damage to Evil creatures in a 40 foot burst. This is a 9th level fucking spell, and would almost never be worth casting even if it was a cantrip. Even most of the buffs are actually terrible. The one that gets the most people fapping over it is luminous armor, which is a 2nd level spell that adds 5 to your AC and gives a -4 penalty to enemies making melee attacks against you. People flip out about how that's a 9 point AC shift and basically the entire RNG. But it grants an armor bonus, which means it doesn't stack with fuckall. And so what you're really getting is like 1 more AC and less perks than having mage armor and shield for two 2nd level spell slots (since you have to cast a lesser restoration to clean up the sacrifice cost of this piece of shit). Which is another thing: how much of a "sacrifice" is it to have to cast lesser restoration? The whole concept is based around personal sacrifice, but it's just a 2nd level spell slot and it doesn't even have to come from you.
There are some incredibly tortured wordings in here. Heavenly lightning does electricity damage that ignores electricity immunity and it ignores electricity resistance that was granted by magic. But if you're naturally electricity resistant (but not naturally resistant enough to count as immune, I guess?) it seems to be reduced normally. Why? Why can't it just do untyped magical damage? But it's also a 5th level spell with short range that only does 3 dice of damage, which means no one will ever cast it. Ever.
There are some spells that fucking kill people. They are marred by being poorly worded and conceived. Blinding Beauty makes all humanoids within 60 feet who can see you save against permanent blindness, and you can do that again every round for the rest of combat, which means that for all the difference it makes it may as well be mass blindness no save for everyone in range (since they have to close their eyes for the rest of the fight to avoid having to save against blindness every round). But that spell has, and I am not making this up: an Abstinence Component, which is that you are not allowed to have sex for a week before you cast it. Also, this is a Druid spell, which means that under most circumstances you will cast it after having charged into battle transformed into a giant octopus. So by being a sexually frustrated giant octopus you become so sexually attractive that all your enemies are blinded. It's... not good. I mean, it's very powerful. But it's stupid. Also, this has the [Good] tag and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
The whole Abstinence component is a thing here. There are some where you aren't allowed to eat or whatever. They aren't all only about abstaining from sex. I still actually have no idea what is supposed to be especially Good about not doing stuff that is healthy and entertaining. The sex one is probably the weirdest though, since bringing joy to people is explicitly [Good] and very few of my sexual encounters have involved the other person crying afterwards.
Some of the shit they do to power up conjurers is just weird. There's a [Good] version of those spells from the BoVD where you conjure up some Dretch servants or whatever. But get this: the hit die limit for demonic servants is separate and cumulative with the hit die limit for celestial servants. It's like they never even considered that maybe you'd just collect the whole set and have a demon squad, a guardinal squad, a skeleton squad and so on and so forth because you're a fucking Wizard and you don't have to worry about whether individual spells are [Good] or [Evil]. All those mini-army limits should have stacked. I mean, hit dice is still an incredibly worthless way to attempt to control minion squad size (as hit dice have only a loose correlation with monster level, and monster power does not rise linearly with level). But giving people separate minion pools for every minion generating spell just makes open mockery of having limits at all.
The chapter has a bunch of fiddly text in it. It's 38 pages long, and a chore to get through because none of the names convey any real information about what the spells do because they are apparently named by drawing pieces of Christian imagery from a hat. I mean, exalted fury and warcry are attack spells and not buffs. The mini-descriptions at the beginning of the chapter are less than useless. For example, you might get really excited when you see radiant fog on the Wizard list and it notes that it is like solid fog but dazzles or blinds. And you're be like Holy Shit That's Awesome. But the actual spell is like solid fog but allows spell resistance to negate the movement hampering effects (thus making it nothing at all like solid fog) and the blinding effect only happens to light sensitive enemies (which is a very short list of enemies once you get past Orcs and Drow, and Drow have SR). Also: no one cares about dazzling enemies who fail a save, because that is literally just -1 to their attack rolls.
Anyway, I give this chapter a D-. There is some stuff in there that people would actually use, but most of that is just reprints from Defenders of the Faith.
-Username17
The whole focus on abstinence is probably the weirdest thing in here for me. I mean, religious fasting is fairly widespread as a concept, but I don't think most people would really class it as particularly good. It might be spiritual or cleansing or whatever, but it's primarily an internal act that doesn't really help anyone. Why they would latch onto that as a prime indicator of a good act is kind of weird.
Actually, Luminous armor is better than you think. As an Armor bonus it can stack with Shield to give you a fairly ridonkulous AC boost at low levels for little investment. Plus, as an Abjuration spell that provides an armor bonus it goes with Abjurant Champion like chocolate with peanut butter, getting an extra +5AC, auto-extend and swift action casting after a few levels. There's also the fact the sacrifice penalty is D2 Str damage. Why would a wizard care about that? Half the time he recovers it next time he rests to prepare spells. Finally, just as the Fighter is getting into his magic Full Plate and finally beating your AC, along comes the level 4 Greater version for +8AC. So it's pretty much +TEXAS to AC for as long as AC remains relevant.Frank Trollman wrote:The one that gets the most people fapping over it is luminous armor, which is a 2nd level spell that adds 5 to your AC and gives a -4 penalty to enemies making melee attacks against you. People flip out about how that's a 9 point AC shift and basically the entire RNG. But it grants an armor bonus, which means it doesn't stack with fuckall. And so what you're really getting is like 1 more AC and less perks than having mage armor and shield for two 2nd level spell slots (since you have to cast a lesser restoration to clean up the sacrifice cost of this piece of shit). Which is another thing: how much of a "sacrifice" is it to have to cast lesser restoration? The whole concept is based around personal sacrifice, but it's just a 2nd level spell slot and it doesn't even have to come from you.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities” - Voltaire
I'm pretty sure we know why: because the apostle Paul hated sex. That is a big part of why many Christians of different flavours hate sex or view "not having sex, even though it's not an evil thing per se" as being a good thing.
Which feeds into their raising kids badly and said kids getting pregnant because everything they know is bullshit.
Anyway. Yeah, Saint Paul hated fun, and because of this, Book of Exalted Deeds actually gets to be a little bit less fun. But we can't blame Paul for the other shit in the book. (Or can we?)
Note that there's a feat where you get bonuses for fucking a Nymph, so clearly abstinence can't be that great. The bonuses are better than those from the shitty Vow, so as long as you wear a blindfold, you're golden.
IIRC the Flower Power spells are pretty decent, doing more ability damage than is considered polite (wait, wasn't ability damage [Evil]?), and there's also Starmantle (again, IIRC), which let's you negate nonmagical damage with a DC 15 Ref Save. Admittedly, on a monster you fight that means precisely dick, because everything you do is magic at that point, but there are plenty of monsters that will feel sad when you dance around being immune to them.
Which feeds into their raising kids badly and said kids getting pregnant because everything they know is bullshit.
Anyway. Yeah, Saint Paul hated fun, and because of this, Book of Exalted Deeds actually gets to be a little bit less fun. But we can't blame Paul for the other shit in the book. (Or can we?)
Note that there's a feat where you get bonuses for fucking a Nymph, so clearly abstinence can't be that great. The bonuses are better than those from the shitty Vow, so as long as you wear a blindfold, you're golden.
IIRC the Flower Power spells are pretty decent, doing more ability damage than is considered polite (wait, wasn't ability damage [Evil]?), and there's also Starmantle (again, IIRC), which let's you negate nonmagical damage with a DC 15 Ref Save. Admittedly, on a monster you fight that means precisely dick, because everything you do is magic at that point, but there are plenty of monsters that will feel sad when you dance around being immune to them.
Last edited by Koumei on Fri Feb 15, 2013 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
Don't go impugning the honor of the forest maidens, Koumei. You need only make out with a Nymph to qualify for the feat.Note that there's a feat where you get bonuses for fucking a Nymph, so clearly abstinence can't be that great. The bonuses are better than those from the shitty Vow, so as long as you wear a blindfold, you're golden.
Game On,
fbmf
-
rasmuswagner
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 705
- Joined: Mon May 16, 2011 9:37 am
- Location: Danmark
Well, I'm usually down with blaming Paul for everything that went wrong with Christianity...but Ravages and Afflictions, and the part where Batman should continue to put mass-murdering Joker in revolving-door Arkham....even Shitbag Paul would probably have facepalmed at that shit.Koumei wrote:
Anyway. Yeah, Saint Paul hated fun, and because of this, Book of Exalted Deeds actually gets to be a little bit less fun. But we can't blame Paul for the other shit in the book. (Or can we?)
Every time you play in a "low magic world" with D&D rules (or derivates), a unicorn steps on a kitten and an orphan drops his ice cream cone.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
The only point in running Abjurant Champion and considering Greater Luminous Armor is if you want to run into melee and rely on a huge AC while you dim mak fools with your Shivering Touch. If you aren't going to run around in melee dropping fools with touch spells, the bonus Greater Luminous Armor has over the lower level Greater Mage Armor (which is an Abjuration as mysteriously as lesser Mage Armor is not) is meaningless. If you are punching people to death with dim mak, taking strength damage actually hurts.
-Username17
-Username17
-
RobbyPants
- King
- Posts: 5202
- Joined: Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:11 pm
Well, the "why" if because of lol Christianity, but you're right that this doesn't fit well into [good] in any sense of the word.Red_Rob wrote:The whole focus on abstinence is probably the weirdest thing in here for me. I mean, religious fasting is fairly widespread as a concept, but I don't think most people would really class it as particularly good. It might be spiritual or cleansing or whatever, but it's primarily an internal act that doesn't really help anyone. Why they would latch onto that as a prime indicator of a good act is kind of weird.
The point of fasting is to show devotion and obedience, which you might be able to use to make a case for [law], but that's not for this book.
-
Silent Wayfarer
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 898
- Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:35 am
Extraordinary Spell Aim an AMF on yourself, now all attacks entering your space are rendered nonmagical and are instantly destroyed by the starmantle (ESA mysteriously excludes people within the spell's spread from being affected by it, so you and your spells are completely immune to the AMF's effect).Koumei wrote:IIRC the Flower Power spells are pretty decent, doing more ability damage than is considered polite (wait, wasn't ability damage [Evil]?), and there's also Starmantle (again, IIRC), which let's you negate nonmagical damage with a DC 15 Ref Save. Admittedly, on a monster you fight that means precisely dick, because everything you do is magic at that point, but there are plenty of monsters that will feel sad when you dance around being immune to them.
And the save only applies to halving the damage from magic attacks directed at you; nonmagical stuff explodes without a save.
Last edited by Silent Wayfarer on Fri Feb 15, 2013 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
You are misrepresenting the spell.FrankTrollman wrote:Chapter 6: Magic
The very first spell in the list is the one where you turn people you hate into frustrated sex slaves while they slowly die. That is called "Affliction" and it is a [Good] spell. Seriously, WTF? A bunch of the spells are reprints, although often as not there is serious functionality loss that harms the game.
You can turn them into sex deprived, but you can also haunt their conseince.
I think the reason it is supposed to be good is it only hurts evil.
Basically BoED says want to kick a baby? Better be a evil baby.
Armageddon is too high a level for its sacrifice/effect.
I'd say 7th level might be low enough. I mean, you are given up a freakin' level for a Astral Deva and his minions.
True damage is low even with no save, hits 1 target per 2 caster.There are some incredibly tortured wordings in here. Heavenly lightning does electricity damage that ignores electricity immunity and it ignores electricity resistance that was granted by magic. But if you're naturally electricity resistant (but not naturally resistant enough to count as immune, I guess?) it seems to be reduced normally. Why? Why can't it just do untyped magical damage? But it's also a 5th level spell with short range that only does 3 dice of damage, which means no one will ever cast it. Ever.
Dude, you have to sacrifice Conjuration for 3 days to cast it. So you can't stack it except once/4 days.Some of the shit they do to power up conjurers is just weird. There's a [Good] version of those spells from the BoVD where you conjure up some Dretch servants or whatever. But get this: the hit die limit for demonic servants is separate and cumulative with the hit die limit for celestial servants. It's like they never even considered that maybe you'd just collect the whole set and have a demon squad, a guardinal squad, a skeleton squad and so on and so forth because you're a fucking Wizard and you don't have to worry about whether individual spells are [Good] or [Evil]. All those mini-army limits should have stacked. I mean, hit dice is still an incredibly worthless way to attempt to control minion squad size (as hit dice have only a loose correlation with monster level, and monster power does not rise linearly with level). But giving people separate minion pools for every minion generating spell just makes open mockery of having limits at all.
It only helps during long downtimes.
Elation is a decent buff: like +2 Str/Dex and also boosts speed. Removes fatigue while up.
Emerard Burst sucks, 1000 gp to cast and just stuns foes for 1d4 rds. As a 5th level.
Heart's Ease cures insanity as a 3rd level spell, removes torture effects, 2d4 Wisdom damage. Duration Permanent so it can be dispelled?
Pheonix fire kills you but does Raise you.Damage 2d6/lv, no damage to good. 1/2 damage is divine (no resisted)
Touch of Adamantine is not [Good] and make a weapon (or unarmed strike) adamantine
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Uh... it lasts for a year. A whole fucking year. It doesn't even take 4 days to cast, you just aren't allowed to use conjuration to add to your minion pool for 3 days before you cast it. But you get the minions for 365 days afterward. The limitation is even only on conjuration before casting it. so you can spend three days adventuring or grooming your skeleton horde or whatever the fuck, and then on the day you call up a bunch of Guardinals you can then have them hold your soul gem while you call up a Lemure horde the same day.Dude, you have to sacrifice Conjuration for 3 days to cast it. So you can't stack it except once/4 days.
It only helps during long downtimes.
-Username17
-
Count Arioch the 28th
- King
- Posts: 6172
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
-
Lago PARANOIA
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
BoED has this weird uncurrent of fetishizing sex while also painting it as evil and sinful. It's extremely creepy.Raging Desire: This affliction causes insatiable sexual desire while preventing any possible fulfillment of that desire.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Welcome to christian culture, when it comes to handeling sex creepy is about all it ever is.Lago PARANOIA wrote:BoED has this weird uncurrent of fetishizing sex while also painting it as evil and sinful. It's extremely creepy.
As for Luminous Armor true it's only maginally better than mage armor or G mage armor to the point that you only want pick it up as an Abjurant Champion and then offset the penalty via wands of lesser restoration. How ever what kind of Gish dosen't drop leves into AC. Ftr 1/Wiz 6/Spellsword 1/ Abjurant Champion 5/(somthing) is the best Arcane Gish build the one were you likely only ever lose one caster level in your entire carrer.
It's a bizarre mixture of... if sex were food, Christianity would consist of the morbidly obese and the anorexic. You can only pick an unhealthy extreme, there is no acceptable middle-ground.Lord Mistborn wrote: Welcome to christian culture, when it comes to handeling sex creepy is about all it ever is.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.
-
Lago PARANOIA
- Invincible Overlord
- Posts: 10555
- Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am
I think the Forsaker is (very) slightly worse than the Apostle of Peace. The AoP at least has the dignity to limit their game-fuckingness in indirect ways. The Forsaker:FrankTrollman wrote:Sure, you could write a class that was worse in some metrics, but I can't envision how you would do so in a way that wasn't obvious parody. And once something is relegated to the joke bin, it's so much less likely to be allowed into a game unmodified that the damage to the game would be incalculably less.
- Forces your DM and party to have to literally rewrite entire adventures to include them. Even a 12th level single-classed Fighter could be polymorphed into a troll or carried around in a bag of holding or whatever the fuck.
- In addition towards suddenly grabbing a game-altering veto they further fuck over their friends by requiring them to either give the party member the finger or set magical items on fire. The best case scenario is that the DM puts a time limit on the campaign and hurries people through it before the forsaker starts. Or makes a further mockery of the wealth by level limits. Fortunately the benefit that forsakers get from hurting their friends isn't very large... but it's the intent that counts.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
How is that different or better than the goddam stupid as shit Vow of Peace.Lago PARANOIA wrote:Forces your DM and party to have to literally rewrite entire adventures to include them. Even a 12th level single-classed Fighter could be polymorphed into a troll or carried around in a bag of holding or whatever the fuck.
I mean, I have never played in a game with someone using the Forsaker class, and I have played with someone using Vow of Peace, so I may be biased, but fuck man, that shit is terrible.
Unrestricted Diplomat 5314 wrote:Accept this truth, as the wisdom of the Crafted: when the oppressors and abusers have won, when the boot of the callous has already trampled you flat, you should always, always take your swing."
The Vow of Nonviolence's shitty guilt-for-killing-dudes penalty only applies when "an ally of yours who slays a helpless or defenseless foe" is close to you or has pinky promised not to act like a murder hobo. Which means that Disintegrate, stabbing someone so they become dying, setting people on fire, poisoning them and whatnot is perfectly fine for your allies to do, as long as it's not as a coup de grace or done to humanoids who have surrendered. You personally are restricted to buffing, healing, illusions, enchantments, etc. but that's fine; those are all valid contributions to the party.
The Forsaker, on the other hand, is required to destroy magic items, refuse to be healed with magic, refuse to have Waterbreathing cast on him before going on the underwater adventure, to resist having raise dead cast on them and in general act like the very worst kind of hoorah, magic-is-for-wussies sundertard in the world. In exchange, he gets full BAB, like 5 DR/magic and spell resistance.
The Vow of Peace dude could theoretically go on the adventure and not be shit. The Forsaker cannot. Everything he does is shit. Now, admittedly, most people who take Vow of Peace are going to actively strive to be shit, but it's not a strict requirement like it is for a Forsaker.
The Forsaker, on the other hand, is required to destroy magic items, refuse to be healed with magic, refuse to have Waterbreathing cast on him before going on the underwater adventure, to resist having raise dead cast on them and in general act like the very worst kind of hoorah, magic-is-for-wussies sundertard in the world. In exchange, he gets full BAB, like 5 DR/magic and spell resistance.
The Vow of Peace dude could theoretically go on the adventure and not be shit. The Forsaker cannot. Everything he does is shit. Now, admittedly, most people who take Vow of Peace are going to actively strive to be shit, but it's not a strict requirement like it is for a Forsaker.
Last edited by Grek on Sat Feb 16, 2013 7:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
Chamomile wrote:Grek is a national treasure.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Technically, the Forsaker can get by ripping cantrip scrolls in half or stomping on healing potions. His fast healing actually means that the amount of gold spent keeping him in fighting fit is actually less than the healing wand charges you have to spend to keep the regular barbarian from collapsing.
Yes, the Forsaker sucks. He can't go on high level adventures unless you kidnap him A-Team style. His bonuses are not big enough to fight real level appropriate enemies with any kind of effectiveness. But at least when he gets repeatedly thrashed by storm giants he fast heals himself back up again. As long as you're doing dungeon crawls with a lot of mook monsters, he can even sort of contribute.
And frankly, warriors having an expiration date somewhere between 7th and 12th level is nothing new. Forsakers are terrible. They are terrible for the game. But Apostles of Peace are worse.
-Username17
Yes, the Forsaker sucks. He can't go on high level adventures unless you kidnap him A-Team style. His bonuses are not big enough to fight real level appropriate enemies with any kind of effectiveness. But at least when he gets repeatedly thrashed by storm giants he fast heals himself back up again. As long as you're doing dungeon crawls with a lot of mook monsters, he can even sort of contribute.
And frankly, warriors having an expiration date somewhere between 7th and 12th level is nothing new. Forsakers are terrible. They are terrible for the game. But Apostles of Peace are worse.
-Username17