Comprehensive Tome Errata

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Sun Jan 16, 2011 7:55 am

Well your friends is dumb.

...and you likely have a small penis. Which causes you to be aggressive towards other humans.
Sadly it seems to make you perversly knowledgable about D&D so I'll continue.

Look, maybe I have a bad version of the tomes or something but here's what the combat section says on trip.

Trip
As an attack action, you may attempt to knock an opponent prone. Make a touch attack, and if you succeed make
a Strength + BAB check against a DC of 10 + your opponent’s Strength + BAB or Balance modifier (whichever is
greater). Success leaves your opponent prone. Failure provokes an attack of opportunity.
Modifiers: The DC to trip an opponent who has four legs or is otherwise inherently stabile is increased by 4. Radially
symmetrical creatures like Oozes cannot be tripped at all.
Edge Option: If you have the edge on your target, you do not provoke an attack of opportunity if your trip attempt fails,
but your target provokes an attack of opportunity from you if your trip succeeds.

Here's what you suggested.

There is a feat that removes Size bonuses to trip checks for both parties.
If you take that feat, and maximize your Str and BAB, you are rolling 1d20+Str+BAB vs 10+str+BAB. So if you are fighting anything that is not a dragon, you succeed at tripping at least half the time. And you can do that from Gnome size.

Does anyone else note that there is no size modifier involved in the tome version of trip? Is that a mistake in my version of the tome? Or is kaelik just being a fucking idiot here?
I recognize of course that giant slayer references trip but trip doesn't say shit about size in the tome. Could just be a typo.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Jan 16, 2011 8:04 am

Midnight_v wrote: Does anyone else note that there is no size modifier involved in the tome version of trip? Is that a mistake in my version of the tome? Or is kaelik just being a fucking idiot here?
I recognize of course that giant slayer references trip but trip doesn't say shit about size in the tome. Could just be a typo.

Yeah, I'm just being a fucking idiot here. I'm honestly not sure what is up with that. Size modifiers for trip apply in 3.5, and Giant Slayer negates them, but they don't exist in Tome. Oh well. So yes, continuing the story, your friend is dumb for a different reason, IE having a higher Str+BAB than your opponent is actually really easy, as long as your opponent isn't a dragon.

BearsAreBrown · Post by **BearsAreBrown** » Sun Jan 16, 2011 5:11 pm

Why don't they exist? Because creatures already have strength gains and losses for size categorizes?

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Sun Jan 16, 2011 5:57 pm

Kaelik wrote:
Midnight_v wrote: Does anyone else note that there is no size modifier involved in the tome version of trip? Is that a mistake in my version of the tome? Or is kaelik just being a fucking idiot here?
I recognize of course that giant slayer references trip but trip doesn't say shit about size in the tome. Could just be a typo.
Yeah, I'm just being a fucking idiot here. I'm honestly not sure what is up with that. Size modifiers for trip apply in 3.5, and Giant Slayer negates them, but they don't exist in Tome. Oh well. So yes, continuing the story, your friend is dumb for a different reason, IE having a higher Str+BAB than your opponent is actually really easy, as long as your opponent isn't a dragon.

Fair enough. I'll tell him he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Thanks Kaelik.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:31 pm

Added a new, extremely explicit knowledge section, give it a read. Still working on my complete item acquisition/crafting rules.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 4:51 pm

Those look pretty reasonable. The level of results granularity is a bit much for me personally but the well defined order is nice and easy enough to follow. Couple of questions though:

[*]Some of the non-monster-applicable knowledges, like Architecture and Engineering, Geography, History, Local, and Nobility and Royalty, can identify classes if they come up. Should the rest just be avoided, or did you have plans to expand their usefulness into the monster ID area?
[*]Carrying around a knowledge booster at high levels also finally means you fairly regularly get to look at the notes, which is probably as it should be if you're going to invest one of your slots in that at high level. I'm concerned that it's overly specific though. Would you be opposed to allowing knowledge bonuses from items to apply to multiple subskills? All of them might be too much, but 2-4 might be ok.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 5:50 am

For the knowledge checks section,

Does species or class determine what sort of type of knowledge check is needed to ID a character's class?

I could see say, religion for any divine caster; the planes for any planar-linked caster; arcana for most spellcasters. However martial character classes are something I'm not sure how one would ID in game.

Tarxisflux,

PCs carrying a complete encyclopaedia in a bag, and pulling out a book that will help them make a check as their first round, or pre-combat, action is pretty flavourful and thematic for characters whose powers are meant to include "database of information".

In general, experienced/powerful characters will seriously lug around their most important/useful gear and have it easily available to them during adventures. For a martial character that means their weapons, for a spellcaster it means scrolls and staffs, for a sage it means a library of reference material, specifically magic textbooks or reference manuals.

I don't feel that a single item should apply to more than a single knowledge check ever; unless knowledge skills are handled completely differently (that is, if they were modified to act more like Frank's modifications for the Perform Skill; where total ranks are used for checks, and individual ranks denote variety of checks able to be made with the skill). I also don't feel that knowledge skills should be changed, folded into a single skill, or anything else along those lines. Mostly because the ability to gain IG knowledge is really handy, and helps to adjucate what a character does, and does not, know.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 12:51 pm

Sounds reasonable. I like seeing the specifics spelled out a little more. I always hate when vague wording is used by MC to cock block abilities from working.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 1:16 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Sounds reasonable. I like seeing the specifics spelled out a little more. I always hate when vague wording is used by MC to cock block abilities from working.

Yeah, a large inspiratiuon was rolling a 35 on knowledge planes for beblith, and being told by the MC "It is likely a beblith, spider demons who are often in service to Lolth.

Oh thanks, that wasn`t a total waste of my time or anything.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:59 pm

I don't particularly like basing the DC off CR, for the reason that the bigger and scarier the monster, the more tales get told about it. It seems weird that more people will have heard tales of the iconic powers of the Gulgar than about Red Dragons or Pit Fiends. Maybe suggest a +/- 5 to the DC based on the obscurity / notoriety of the target in the current campaign setting?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Mar 14, 2011 11:07 pm

Red_Rob wrote:I don't particularly like basing the DC off CR, for the reason that the bigger and scarier the monster, the more tales get told about it. It seems weird that more people will have heard tales of the iconic powers of the Gulgar than about Red Dragons or Pit Fiends. Maybe suggest a +/- 5 to the DC based on the obscurity / notoriety of the target in the current campaign setting?

No. Make up your own circumstance modifiers. If you are facing something within encounter guidelines at all, you will almost always make the DC. It's fucking 10+CR against 1d20+CR+3+Int mod+bonuses.

You are going to make the damn check. People tell lots of stories about Red Dragons, about how they fly around burning things and are evil. So if you exceed the DC by 3, you get all that information. IE, if you can roll a goddam 10, and you have no bonuses, and your int mod is +0.

If you want to know that a Red Dragon gets Locate Object, you can fucking earn it.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 2:21 am

Actually Red Rob it's seems weird to you because you don't know the powers of a Gulgar out of the box.

Your character, you know, lives and dies by the information that they've picked up. They probably know more about the niceties of Gulgar dining than anyone even cares about to note down.

They also don't know anything about:

-Automobiles
-Electricity (artificial, non-magical)
-The Internet
-Telephones
-Radio
-Structured Medical systems involving university & medical school
-Modern Hygine
-Properly maintaining their nutritional needs
-etc.

Anything in the above category would seem equally weird to your PC.

Really, it makes a great big pile of sense that your character will know all sorts of stuff that you, the player, can't possibly ever know, or be assed to know.

This isn't "pretend to be an adventurer based on your ideas and information" it's "roleplay that you are an adventurer who lives in a world, and understands their world better than the player does".

I've always felt that meta-gaming works both ways. Players do not know enough about a setting or their character to be properly roleplaying in it; while Characters don't know that they are being puppeted along by some rube who is going to march them to their very merry death.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 7:13 am

Kaelik wrote:No. Make up your own circumstance modifiers.

Fairy nuff

Judging Eagle wrote:Actually Red Rob it's seems weird to you because you don't know the powers of a Gulgar out of the box.

No, it seems weird to me because the Gulgar are supposed to be rare creatures from another dimension. I was bitching that there was no accounting for rarity, or particularly notorious monsters beyond CR rating, however as Kaelik pointed out a circumstance modifier takes care of that without the need for more tables of modifiers noone will ever remember.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:48 am

Is it just me, or is the Battlefield Surgeon feat rather useless to any D&D character who actually wants to heal?

This is D&D, and those characters use healing magic and healing magic items, so feat needs to interact with those in some way, instead of being crappier versions of abilities the cleric got for free 3 to 5 levels ago.

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:02 pm

Quick question on the Extra Summons and Dominions of the Infernal feats from Tome of Fiends: Does the Summon ability of the Summoner class satisfy the prerequisite for those feats?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Aug 22, 2011 8:21 pm

Archmage Joda wrote:Quick question on the Extra Summons and Dominions of the Infernal feats from Tome of Fiends: Does the Summon ability of the Summoner class satisfy the prerequisite for those feats?

1) I am not technically the writer, so you know.

2) I would say yes, as far as should it.

3) I would say yes by RAW, but I could see how the "of the Fiendish Houses" thing might cause someone to rule otherwise.

Dominicius · Post by **Dominicius** » Mon Aug 29, 2011 9:16 pm

One revision I would like to suggest is removing the Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus from the Mot7NM requirements and replacing them with the Reaper or Overlord feats I made here:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=141814#141814 (I am still a little proud of those)

Dominicius · Post by **Dominicius** » Sun Sep 04, 2011 2:36 pm

One more question I'd like to ask, if all scrolls are minor items, does that mean that they also cost around 4000 gold to fashion making it impossible for low level wizards to learn spells while later on they basically become free?

Also, you can cast spells that have long casting times and/or permanent duration with a scroll but you can't do it with a staff. Also, what is stopping a wizard from wishing himself an infinity of minor staves that all have 9th level spells bound to them?

Shouldn't it be that scrolls and staves with spells of 4th level and up count as moderate items and those with 7th level spells and up count as major items or something like that?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Sep 04, 2011 9:32 pm

Dominicius wrote:One more question I'd like to ask, if all scrolls are minor items, does that mean that they also cost around 4000 gold to fashion making it impossible for low level wizards to learn spells while later on they basically become free?

The 4000gp is a base price, and my current theory that is still under work as part of my general crafting/item rules that no one has seen is that the base price is multiplied by a factor that is 1.0 for CL ten items, with +/- one tenth per CL difference.

So level 1 scrolls cost 200gp, and level 9 scrolls cost 6400gp.

The result is that technically CL 9 moderate items are wishable, and I think I want to change it to only CL 8, specifically to prevent people from having instantaneous attack spells of 5th level at will.

Dominicius wrote:Also, can cast spells that have long casting times and/or permanent duration with scroll but you can't do it with a staff. Also, what is stopping a wizard from wishing himself an infinity of minor staves that all have 9th level spells bound to them?

I'm not sure what your first question about casting times is, but yeah that's a problem, which I have now fixed, although, the ways Staves work, it would only be useful if they had a particular 9th level buff that they thought was worth an item slot (Shapechange/Gate, if I didn't ban them) Or for instantaneous/short duration attack spells, IE Wail of the Banshee/Black Blade/Sphere of Implosion.

Also Timestop I suppose.

EDIT: May want to reread the Dungeonomicon section for duration changes, that's a really recent change.

BearsAreBrown · Post by **BearsAreBrown** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 3:11 am

Do metamagic feats work with class abilities labeled (sp)?

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 3:52 am

BearsAreBrown wrote:Do metamagic feats work with class abilities labeled (sp)?

And if so, how do you determine how many levels of metamagic you can stick on them? 1 level per two levels you've gained since you gained the ability?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 4:27 am

Please read this section of the SRD.

Having established that, Every Single Fucking SP Ability Needs A Spell Level.

Yes, lots of them don't have them, because WoTC designers and TGD designers often forget that. But it turns out, that you actually have to have one.

Because you need to know:

1) How it interacts with Globe of Invulnerability
2) What the DC for concentration checks are
3) The level of spell resembled or duplicated for the purpose of DC (before my comprehensive save DC system)

So yes, the metamagic effects can be applied to any Sp class ability, or monster ability (such as Fiendish Summons).

But first you have to find out what spell level the SLA is. And good luck with that. I think I went back through and added spell levels to Storm Lord effects at one point for exactly this reason, but maybe not, or maybe I missed some.

So the answer is you can stick as many metamagic levels on them as it takes to bring them up to your maximum of 1/2 character level, rounded up.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 5:12 am

Kaelik wrote:But first you have to find out what spell level the SLA is. And good luck with that. I think I went back through and added spell levels to Storm Lord effects at one point for exactly this reason, but maybe not, or maybe I missed some.

I think I have a job to do, with all my classes, then.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 12:33 am

The Problem with Assassins is that no feat they ever take will be as useful to them as a Combat feat to a Samurai. The Solution is better feats for the Assassin, not a change to the class

Well... I know you wrote that section long ago, but did you feel like the addtion of the skill feats corrected that problem signifigantly? Or are the skill feats exactly what you ultimatley were refering to, Kaelik?

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Oct 19, 2011 5:51 am

Some question about Samurai Kiai! interacting with whirlwind attack came up in tonight's game. With the single attack roll against multiple targets for Whirlwind, it's somewhat ambiguous whether a single use of Kiai! can crit everyone hit by the whirlwind, or if the samurai must expend one daily usage of Kiai! per whirlwind victim they wish to crit.

It probably keeps things saner to require one use of Kiai! per target, despite the single attack roll.