The Gaming Den

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I admit that suggestion brought a smile to my face, but if I present my heartbreaker notes to my group and the class list reads:

Assassin
Barbarian
Knight
Sage
Sorcerer
Luchador

...I'll be laughed out of the room.

The problem is that while the "Martial Artist" has an available route to epic power by turning into Goku, the "Swashbuckler" does not. There is no word for "guy who runs around with a rapier" that goes to 11. By D&D standards, that concept doesn't even go to 8.

-Username17

I suppose you could just call it the "Martial Adept" or something, with the assumption that at level X they become an "Astral Adept", suddenly darting between planes for their tricky movement and stabbing you in the soul.

Tome monk then.

Frank wrote:The problem is that while the "Martial Artist" has an available route to epic power by turning into Goku, the "Swashbuckler" does not. There is no word for "guy who runs around with a rapier" that goes to 11. By D&D standards, that concept doesn't even go to 8.

I know, that's precisely why I didn't make a separate Swashbuckler class.

To quote myself from a month-old thread:

The Martial Artist -which is a sucky name, but more precise here than "monk"- can also cover all your weeaboo fightan magic needs, and in fact a "Swashbuckler" or "Duelist" is probably best represented as a Martial Artist (until shit gets crazy at level 9+, anyway, but the swashbuckler archetype is a fundamentally low-level one, with no way to get magicked up without changing completely, so I don't see any better solution.)

It is neither news nor a problem to me that if Zorro or Inigo want to get higher than 6th level they'll have to start throwing blade magic around and accept a major departure from their original concepts. But I still want to be able to represent Zorro and Inigo in the system, and the lightly-armored exotic stylist seems like the best class to fit them into.

Edit: And fectin, yes, basically. Except that I'll need to write a new class anyway, because I'm making more changes than just the class list, so I can't just import the Tome monk and be done with it.

Jedi.

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A Black Bag is 2,000gp or a daily 1st level spell slot and serves as a portable hole for evil magic items and items with an evil spell in it's prereqs, as well as giving you infinite daggers for your knife throwing rogue.

I don't think you're missing anything, because WotC very early on said that portable holes were cheap as shit so long as they interact with alignment shenanigans.

The gp costs on mid-level utility items are too high across the board. Part way through 3.5, they finally noticed that people weren't using Murlynd's Spoon or Portable Holes or whatever the fuck, and started trying to do something about it. One of their more successful plans was to introduce new items with trivial limitations that were a fuck tonne cheaper. So you get things like the everfull bag of rations.

-Username17

So I was thinking about weird planar/post-wish currencies that specifically utilise the whole "team evil wants these and can't just take it from their own minions" - they don't actually need to steal souls/joy/pain from others, they can just go Shang Tsung on their loyal followers/give puppies to their followers and suck the happiness out/slam their genitals into car doors and then extract the pain.

So I thought "Okay, so it has to be something they definitionally lack."

Which brought me to: virtue/innocence/purity. And Purity made me think:



Like you're even surprised

Now, innocence/purity could actually be taken as some kind of "unaligned" thing where making a moral choice and siding with any team costs you your innocence, and Paladins also lack that quality. Forces of good could in fact beat evil up, take the bottled purity they stole, and consume it to retain both their Goodness and their Purity, which does [THINGS].

Alternatively, going specifically from Virtue, this means they target the Good more than anything else, though you could surely get virtuous Neutral people, and this has the bonus where stealing someone's Virtue actually gives you a bottle of Charity or Wisdom or whatever, and they turn into a Sailor Moon Monster-of-the-Week that is based on the inversion of their Virtue. The Virtues totally needn't be the Christian ones. In fact, they need to not just be the Christian ones but be "anything that could be seen as a really positive trait".

But that brings up the next problem. See, it's all very good for them to have a reason why they need to take it from non-Evil people, but this doesn't give them a reason to want it at all - presumably they were fine with giving theirs away the first time. So let's say you're a Lich King, or a Pit Fiend, or a Black Guard, or your mother. You're totally evil, and you want to steal someone's Pure Heart. Why?

Would it be "hold a gun to it and extract great services from Celestials that are willing to do your bidding in exchange for these valuable things"? Or is it totally reasonable that you can feed a pile of goodness into your doomfire cannon and have it blast things with evil doomfire still? Would eating it simply destroy a finite amount of Goodness in the world, or would it infuse you with that good trait and you run the risk of losing your Evil membership?

It had something to do with worshiping Kurtulmak iirc, it's a relic of the god of Koe-Bolds.

Just watched all of Unforgotten Realms yesterday. Funny as hell.

Alternatively, going specifically from Virtue, this means they target the Good more than anything else, though you could surely get virtuous Neutral people, and this has the bonus where stealing someone's Virtue actually gives you a bottle of Charity or Wisdom or whatever, and they turn into a Sailor Moon Monster-of-the-Week that is based on the inversion of their Virtue. The Virtues totally needn't be the Christian ones. In fact, they need to not just be the Christian ones but be "anything that could be seen as a really positive trait".

But that brings up the next problem. See, it's all very good for them to have a reason why they need to take it from non-Evil people, but this doesn't give them a reason to want it at all - presumably they were fine with giving theirs away the first time. So let's say you're a Lich King, or a Pit Fiend, or a Black Guard, or your mother. You're totally evil, and you want to steal someone's Pure Heart. Why?

With your definition of Virtue, it seems pretty obvious. A Virtue can be any strongly positive trait, and evil characters lack Virtue. You don't have Courage, Fortitude or Patience -so you steal some to enjoy the benefit of it.

Except you run into a new problem where evil characters can be virtuous if you're saying virtue is any positive trait:

Frank wrote:Baatorian virtues can be played positively:

Integrity, Courage, Industry, Patience, Acuity, Loyalty, and Justice.

The seven Baatorian Virtues are all virtuous, they just don't happen to include any of that compassion, humility, or tolerance crap that more liberal planets seem to care about.

Not a problem as such, just a potentially dissatisfying redefinition of what good and evil means.

It's a problem if you're saying Team Evil wants distilled virtue because they lack it. It's easily fixed by making a list of specific things which you are saying are virtues, which would logically be things Team Evil doesn't have, like Compassion or Altruism.

...no, I know what I said and I meant it.

If you define virtue as "any positive character trait" and say that evil people are by definition unvirtuous, it follows that evil people will have a severe deficit of positive character traits. They will be selfish, cowardly, rash, lazy and what have you. Not necessarily all of those at once, but they will be "bad people".

That's a departure from what "evil" is generally taken to mean, but how is it a problem?

Well for starters, people who suck at everything don't make for very compelling antagonists.

I'd have all kinds of different "Virtues," some of them are inherently Good (compassion, charity) and others might be inherently Evil (though I can't think of any off the top of my head), but most are Neutral. Evil doesn't care anymore than Good how much Courage and Loyalty you bring them 'cause they already have that stuff, but they're happy to use Compassion as a fuel source. It physically decreases the amount of Compassion in the world while also fueling their sweet rave parties. You can get some Law/Chaos stuff going on here by having some virtues be inherently Lawful (Loyalty, Justice) and some inherently Chaotic (Freedom, Creativity), so a Lawful society will burn Creativity for fuel 'cause they don't care. But then you have to wrangle with trying to make Law and Chaos make sense and that's hard.

How (in pathfinder) does Magic Jar work for a Shadow demon?

It is incorporeal (no physical body), no gem to house the soul in etc.

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Firstly: Shadow Demons do have a body, that body is simply incorporeal. However, they also obey the body-soul unity rule for outsiders. If the Shadow Demon's soul goes into something, so does the demon's body.

Secondly: Magic Jar lets you put your soul into a gem and has a gem as a focus component. These are separate requirements - nothing requires that the gem you use as a focus be the gem you use as the magic jar. Most people use it that way, since it's the most obvious gem to use, but you don't have to.

SLA Magic Jar removes the focus component, but does not (as written) change what the spell does. Thus, the Shadow Demon can shift its soul (and body) into any gem or large crystal of any value for up to 10 hours at a time and then possess creatures as per Magic Jar.

Chamomile wrote:Well for starters, people who suck at everything don't make for very compelling antagonists.

Yeah, if you say "Any positive trait is a virtue." and "Evil is completely lacking in virtue." then what you're really saying is that Team Evil is entirely composed of Team Rocket, storm troopers, Jack Spicer, and Zim.



When these are your forces of evil, the paladin is on less shaky moral ground punching a kitten.

ubernoob wrote:

ishy wrote:How (in pathfinder) does Magic Jar work for a Shadow demon?

It is incorporeal (no physical body), no gem to house the soul in etc.

I'd run that as possession. Skip the whole receptacle thing (since SLAs don't have components anyways) and go straight to the jumping into other creatures bodies. The actual rules are essentially that demons/devils/angels/all the other special outsiders literally cannot cast magic jar because their body and soul are the same thing (as far as I remember).

But yeah, the intent is probably to just go straight to the Will save vs possession.

Yeah just found it in some shitty pf supplement that this is indeed the case. ((though it has no body, because of the incorporeal subtype))
Thanks.

Prak_Anima wrote:Except you run into a new problem where evil characters can be virtuous if you're saying virtue is any positive trait:

Frank wrote:Baatorian virtues can be played positively:

Integrity, Courage, Industry, Patience, Acuity, Loyalty, and Justice.

The seven Baatorian Virtues are all virtuous, they just don't happen to include any of that compassion, humility, or tolerance crap that more liberal planets seem to care about.

You could keep evil virtues and still keep an demand for good virtues by the evil people, if you need an combination of (evil neutral and good) virtues to do something useful.

Has anyone ever played Nobilis? How was it?