Eberron Sucks?

NoDot · Post by **NoDot** » Sat Jun 21, 2008 5:11 pm

Kaelik wrote:Option B) Play a Psionic Sorcerer, IE Psion.

Better.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 4:38 am

Back on the topic of Eberron...

I kinda like the idea of a world that hasn't had high level people / they're all dead / what the fuck ever and the PCs become the people to usher in the wish economy. That said, a campaign world with such in the case should tell you ahead of time what that's going to mean for the world, what will probably happen, etc. Eberron doesn't do that at all...it just buries its head in the sand.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 5:28 am

The planar arrangements of eberron make the high level stuff kind of questionable, too. AFAIK, the city of brass isn't out there in the wacky orbiting planes, and you can't go out and have a chat with one god or the other. The afterlife simply involves being trapped on a particularly boring plane.

Solars and devils and whatnot are out there on the little spiraling planes, but they don't seem to be doing anything. The particularly nasty planes might invade from time to time, but really, I don't know what any of those beings want or need from the primary world- they can sit out eternity playing politics among themselves, and it isn't even clear that a pack of devils can get from wherever they are to wherever the solars are to do anything interesting.

So you can go into the half-arsed underdark and bother the demons and nightmare creatures (or whatever) that are trapped down there, and I guess kill people who want to free them, but... eh. The setting can't seem to make up its mind if they're actually trapped or building empires down there. It certainly doesn't manage to make me care about them. The Cults of the Dragon Below could be interesting, but as far as I can tell, they got written off as 'Madness! They're all mad I tell you!' and you can do whatever boring thing you want to with them.

belkalra · Post by **belkalra** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 6:08 am

I dunno, maybe its just me, but Eberron has always come off to me as a coiled spring, where everyone wants to eradicate at least one other group leading to a mexican standoff of Planar Proportions and you had the luck to walk right into the middle of it. you've got a very antsy island of high powered dragons who might decide the stars tell them to blow everything up, or that the things they are sitting on get free and blow everything up, or the the evil dream spirit things (the Quori I believe) make an oopsie while trying to merge the lands of the conscious and the not and blow everything up, or the Demon Rajahs finally reawaken and blow everything up or the Titular dragon awakens from his slumber and blows everything up by breathing or the giants rediscovering magic and blowing everything up or the madness comes from Xoriat and makes everyone wish that everything had blown up. oh, almost forgot, something is spreading vapory death and the low lvls have to figure out whats doing it. honestly it seemed more steampunk with a light magical glaze version of the cold war, but about 200 superpowers with nukes. That's just been my impression though

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 8:13 pm

belkalra wrote:I dunno, maybe its just me, but Eberron has always come off to me as a coiled spring, where everyone wants to eradicate at least one other group leading to a mexican standoff of Planar Proportions and you had the luck to walk right into the middle of it.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

You see cold war Mexican standoff; I see endless adventure opportunities.

Cielingcat · Post by **Cielingcat** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:08 pm

Eberron does work sort of well as a setting for low level adventure's. Some of the stuff is stupid, but overall it does have enough neat things to keep people interested.

I believe the setting was intentionally built to be able to start collapsing at any minute to facilitate heroic adventures. The fact that it collapses economically and politically from high level adventurers is an oversight stemming from the fact that its writer likely doesn't really know about things like the abilities of Fabricate and such.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:17 pm

Talisman wrote:You see cold war Mexican standoff; I see endless adventure opportunities.

I see both!

Cielingcat wrote:I believe the setting was intentionally built to be able to start collapsing at any minute to facilitate heroic adventures. The fact that it collapses economically and politically from high level adventurers is an oversight stemming from the fact that its writer likely doesn't really know about things like the abilities of Fabricate and such.

Of course, WOTC didn't get batman wizards until after 3.5 and eberron came out. Their response was to make fail. It can also be argued that Warforged, the magic death cloud zone, and everything else about the Last War was caused by the last crop of high-level adventurers. That might even have been the intent before development of the setting was given to WOTC. In general, I think that the setting makes more sense at low levels than most others do.

PhaedrusXY · Post by **PhaedrusXY** » Thu Jun 26, 2008 11:11 pm

That's why Raistlin is the best character ever in Dragonlance. He took one look at the gods and was like "Man, all you mofo's are a bunch of douches!", and killed them all.

Voss wrote:Ugh. The fans fanwank it pretty hard. Go on ENworld and post about Dragonlance. A guy named Cam Banks (who worked on a lot of the 3e Dragonlance stuff, apparently) will come and mindlessly defend it no matter what issue you raise.

The lack of judgement thing doesn't wash. Over the history of the setting, punishing large groups of mortals and the gods up and abandoning their worshipers (because they were bad, and later, for their own good, which gets kinda wacky, or various other minor reasons) happens repeatedly, and apparently the vast majority of people are OK with that. They really make Zeus look like a deity who will stand up for his worshipers and be there to support them no matter what. Older elves in the current age of the setting have had the gods abandon them at least twice, for reasons that don't make much sense. I really don't know why you'd want to be a cleric of these gods, but the books make the point that 'True Healing' is worth being repeatedly sodomized for. With petrified hedgehogs.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 2:28 am

I think one of the ideas that went into designing eberron(it was designed by a player for one of those "do our work for us" contests) was that it was a setting with a bunch of cool shit(ie, the iconic monsters) with a heavy ladle of steampunk(made to look like mage punk) and served up in a bowl of pulp novel style adventuring. Basically when you're playing eberron, your characters are hard boiled detectives and badass adenturers running around a world where gnomes visited Victorian england and said "we can do better". So, as far as high level adventure go, what would Sam Spade and Indiana Jones do at 15th level in a world full of magetrains and dirigibles, and populated by the iconic D&D monsters? Probably get hired by some hot dame with wings to check up on the Lords of Nine or decide to go looking for massive loot in the lower planes.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 9:09 pm

NoDot wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Option B) Play a Psionic Sorcerer, IE Psion.
Better.

.... huh?

Psionic Sorcerer?

Was it anything like the AD&D mess of ability-check-plus-PP crap? Or more like a kit or template for regular mages?

NoDot · Post by **NoDot** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 3:44 am

The Psion is a Psionically-flavored, INT-based Sorcerer and not a Psionically-flavored Wizard.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 1:40 pm

No, it's a class in its own right. Its included in the SRD, which can be found as an online reference here or as a bunch of annoying word documents here.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:04 pm

zerus, they're talking about the mechanics and style of the class.

Some of TGD people have a real hate for the Psionic classes, b/c really, they don't do anything for the game.

Look up Psychic Grease. It should be in the d20 SRD webpage (d20srd.org). You'll notice how much it adds to the game play.

A lot of the Psionic abilites are like that. That's bad, and dumb.

You're actually better off playing a Sorcerer and just calling it a Psion. Mechanically it's nearly the same.

Heck, I've played a "Soul Knife" that was better at fighting in the method that involved shooting weapons into enemies than the actual Soul Knife class.

I explained to an other player that the Soul Knife as written was... a failure. Then I told him that I would find an equally flavourful replacement that was more effective at doing the same task.

I used the class 'Ranger' from the 3.5 Player's Handbook. The person who played an actual Soulknife abandoned his character for a Dungenomicon Monk after the first session. I rolled a RoW barbarian, since we needed a tank.

zeruslord · Post by **zeruslord** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:20 pm

I was responding to sigma999's post, asking wether it was a kit or something. The answer to that is no. NoDot ninja'd me and made me look dumb

Harlune · Post by **Harlune** » Sat Jun 28, 2008 10:27 pm

Judging__Eagle wrote: You're actually better off playing a Sorcerer and just calling it a Psion. Mechanically it's nearly the same.

If only we could combine the two in such a way that takes out all the suck so we could end up with an int based, spontaneous arcane caster with bonus feats, a good class skill list, and a wide selection of flexible, scaling spells that don't need somatic or material components and can be used with the Quicken Spell feat without setting a bunch of other feats on fire to do it.

NoDot · Post by **NoDot** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 12:59 am

Judging__Eagle wrote:Some of TGD people have a real hate for the Psionic classes, b/c really, they don't do anything for the game.

They add the ability for you to play (1) someone who is smart and blows things up with his mind or (2) someone who beats things up with help from her mind. The mechanics just don't hold up in Gaming Den-level play. (Just like the Warlock, Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, Magic of Incarnum, ...)

The problems are: the Soulkife, non-standard mechanics, underpowered compared to Batman Wizard and CoDzilla, the Wielder, and the Soulknife.
(The Souknife should be a feat.)

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 2:16 am

NoDot wrote:
Judging__Eagle wrote:Some of TGD people have a real hate for the Psionic classes, b/c really, they don't do anything for the game.
They add the ability for you to play (1) someone who is smart and blows things up with his mind or (2) someone who beats things up with help from her mind.

A wizard?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:32 am

A wizard, except a spontaneous one who can't learn spells from scrolls (I think they have a name for that, something to do with saucers...) and who has a stupid flavour that, in my goddamn fantasy, only belongs as a special monster ability (a descriptor for its spell-likes) if you're not playing Sci-Fi or GrimDark Fantasy in Space.

And yes, I know some people are going to bitch and moan that I'm not being open minded, or that their vision of fantasy allows it or that Stormwind is always right or whatever. But I have a succinct response prepared for those.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:51 am

Nah, the Stormwind fallacy can't be used here.

We're not talking about Powergamers =/= Roleplayers here.

We're talking about how stupid mechanics shouldn't be used for a different flavor of Sorcerer.

Seriously, Int-based Sorcerer. That's it.

If you wanted to, you could maybe give some extra slots and you have to specialize in a school, or flavor of spell types. So, a Pyrokinetic's spells are all fire damage, while a Telepath relies on mind-control abilities, whatever.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 5:51 am

JE wrote:
Nah, the Stormwind fallacy can't be used here.

True, but we're talking about Stormwind's other pet project: "Make everyone love Psionics." Unlike the Stormwind Fallacy argument, which is rather elegant and fairly air tight, his "Psionics Changes Everything: For the Better" argument is pretty lame. Basically it comes down to "I really like people who can inflict damage in any of a wide variety of energy types, as long as it happens to come in cone format." Seriously man, what the fuck?

He makes a great argument backed up by simple and powerful logic, and then a bunch of other people act like completely emotional arguments he makes on other subjects have special weight because of it. That's only sort of how it works.

The fact that he likes the flavor of the XPH psion is not especially relevant in a discussion of whether the rule set is especially good.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 5:53 am

Oh, I wasn't talking about the Stormwind fallacy, but about part of his sig - the bit about "If you don't include Psionics in your game, you suck and are a shit GM and I will personally cockslap you in your sleep."

Which in turn makes others include that in their sigs, and convinces them they have the right to force it upon your game, and in general makes the DM want to ship them off to Auschwitz as the final solution to the psionics problem.

...

I just invoked Godwin's law, didn't I?

But yes, taking the Sorcerer (better if it's one of the variants floating around here - either the "I spontaneously cast ANYTHING, bitches!" or the "I gain spell levels and feats like a Wizard" one), making it Int-based and perhaps allowing a specialisation of sorts would work just fine.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 6:18 am

Heh. Int-based psions. Good job, guys. Good job.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 6:35 am

Oh, well. Pffft.

He likes the flavor.

Just play a Sorcer and call it a Psion. Just like when I played a Ranger, and called it a Soulknife.

Really, I'm more for classes being pretty bland, and the player being forced into giving it flavor.

If you're a Barbarian, there's very little that people think you can do with it. So they tend to not do much with it.

If you're an "angreh warrior", you can explain why you're angry, or what makes you angry, or w/e. You have to put up some boundaries, if not your character doesn't make so much sense or it's all over the place.

Sticking by the classes of XPH isn't good from a mechanical aspect, but also, it sucks from a flavor aspect. How hard do most people stay in character when their class can be used to encompass their entire character.

If you're a Telepath, pretty much all you do is mind-rape people. So? That's boring, since you'll probably only do that.

Of course, I prefer to get inside a character's head and think of a reason that makes their actions make sense to the character.

NoDot · Post by **NoDot** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:05 am

Judging__Eagle wrote:Just play a Sorcer and call it a Psion.

Unfortunately, the mechanics as written do not support that. In particular:

Verbal Components
Somatic Components (and ASF)
Insignificant Material Components

You can burn a feat to cure that last one, but the others stand in opposition to the flavor of a Psion.

Harlune · Post by **Harlune** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:56 am

Judging__Eagle wrote:Oh, well. Pffft.

Just like when I played a Ranger, and called it a Soulknife.

One question, how did you handle the whole mindblade-y aspect of that and the scaling issues, or did you just say that every time you found/bought/stole a new weapon, it was actually your glowy energy mind penis thingy going up a level?