sigh.Sacrificial Lamb wrote:I don't know who Elothar: Warrior of Bladereac is, but....ok. As far as expectations, I actually had no expectations at all. Various members of this site seem to possess some knowledge of D&D 3.5, so I felt that it might be good for someone else to evaluate the class.....and point out any glaring flaws.Eikre wrote:Lamb, you're pretty transparently asking people to entertain your Elothar: Warrior of Bladereach base class. You're writing bespoke homebrew to match whatever personal preferences you have for the particular character you're playing right now. What kind of analysis are you expecting? As aggravated as you are about Kaelik's rude aggression in slapping the dicks out of your mouth, he still called it in his first post: Your DM probably isn't going to veto you, because you're trading good features for less-good features and that's not going to break his game. Does anything else matter?
Start using the site search for this stuff.
[url=http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=28550#28550 wrote:Dungeonomicon[/url]]Elothar Warrior of Bladereach
"My name is Elothar. Your name is unimportant, for you shall soon be dead."
The city of Bladereach sits at the mouth of the Typhon River that flows from the Bane Mires into Ferrin's Bay. The elves of Celentian's caravan come every year to trade with the largely human inhabitants of Bladereach and sometimes they leave more than the wares of the Black Orchard Hills when they leave. The results of these dalliances find that they never fit in amongst the people of Bladereach, and are taught the hard secrets of battle that the children of Bladereach have to offer. Often, these half-elven warriors turn to adventuring.
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We all know that 90% of PrCs are "Steve's Ninja of the Cresent Moon" rather than "Ninja of the Cresent Moon", a PrC intended for mass play.
The Elothar Warrior is our way of pointing out this fact. Lets face it: people don't even consider playing most PrCs. Not only do they have a very specific flavor, but they are usually intended to shore up the weaknesses of specific players and not their characters.
Just look at the Daggerspell Jag-offs in Complete Adventurer. That's one dude's hard-on for double daggers and not anything the average gamer even wants in his game (did we ever need double dagger arcane/druid wildshapers? Ever?).
Ok, there's what you want to do, and there's what you want to have. What you want to do is just write up a quick variant, the end product you want to have, however, is basically an entirely new class with nothing to do with druids.sacrificiallamb wrote:My goal was absolutely not to create an entirely new class, but to instead create a variant that fit the needs of my campaign.
But instead, I had people continually implying that I should create an entirely new class from scratch, when that isn't what I want at all.
Lurk moar.But no, I had absolutely no idea what type of response I would receive here, although I'll admit the hostility really surprised me. I know that there's some ball-busting on this site from time to time, but I didn't expect Kaelik's rabid foaming of the mouth, or Trollman's blatant attempt to derail and troll the thread with a pointless rant over his hatred of JangK's class Tier system, or any of the other bullshit in this thread.....that had little to do with an actual evaluation of the class.
Because you're posting for a larger audience. If you just want to know if something is appropriate, then the post is really "Hey guys, what do you think of [removing the core thematic abilities of the druid] and replacing them with [a bunch of mechanically weaker things]?" Then we'll respond with variations of "Um. We don't know why you'd want to do that, but, sure, whatever. It's not like it makes you more powerful..." If you're posting for others' consumption, then the thing you post needs to have a theme that explains the existence of its abilities, and a reason to exist. Seriously, this variant has no reason to exist outside of the campaign you're playing in.Why does a class variant require a large amount of "real mechanical novelty" when it fits the theme I'm looking for, provides the game mechanics I want, and handles smoothly in play?Eikre wrote:If this is meant to be a contribution for serious consideration and widespread applicability, be advised: Without the inclusion of any real mechanical novelty, and without speaking to a theme that resonates more, your work is only another entry to the tall pile of pulpy Pathfinder-brand filler content. And, while it's true that lots of people are very interested to read that stuff, they only do so when it's official, thus meeting the constraints on the material they use for CharOp solitaire.
Originality is nice, but it's largely overrated.
Thoroughness doesn't necessitate copy/pasta from the SRD, all you need to do is say "this variant has all the abilities of [base class] except where noted below" and then when an ability is replacing something say "this ability replaces [thing]."I don't know what I did wrong here. I believe in being thorough, so that there's no confusion on how the class functions. But for the sake of sanity, I'll try it your way in the future.Eikre wrote:... do me a personal favor and stop writing a long-form document with all the copy/paste'd SRD content. Haven't you noticed how almost every variant is formatted exclusively as a list of the modified features? When you transcribe all the unmodified shit, you demand that the reader play a game of Find the Difference before he can make an evaluation, and it's a goddamned waste of time for anybody not sitting in a pediatrician's waiting room.