The Gaming Den

For Valor wrote:er... isn't the Samurai ridiculously overpowered? I thought it was Kaelik or someone who said that the Tome Samurai has a ~100% winstreak against all encounters of its CR... or something.

At level 6. And the way the SGT works, the Samurai is never out of Kais, so it favors him a lot.

In practice, the Dungeonomicon was designed with SGT in mind. Then the Tome of Fiends is roughly balanced on Dungeonomicon.

Tome of Necromancy is... Well, you can have infinite minions and therefore autowin every fight, but I hate infinite minions, so I don't ever use it.

Then Races of War fucked balance up the ass because every combat class is much much better than SGT (And Monk had a graduating party, since it's full BAB).

At this point, pretty much every Tome class hits 70% minimum, and is therefore OPed according to SGT.

The way I fix that is by just replacing monster feats and optimizing monsters. Technically, they are all still challenged by a CR X monster, even if they can all solo every CR 6 monster in the MM as written with a 100% success rate.

Kaelik wrote:The way I fix that is by just replacing monster feats and optimizing monsters. Technically, they are all still challenged by a CR X monster, even if they can all solo every CR 6 monster in the MM as written with a 100% success rate.

I agree with you, but there are people in my gaming group that think that the monster is a CR X with only those feats and that changing a feat is not just using resources slightly differently, but actually modifying CR. I've always found that kind of silly. They have the option of Y feats and, in theory, all feats should be around equal power. So Y feats should be Z power. In practice it doesn't work like that, but in Tome it is the simplest way to challenge players.

Just like a monster built as a PC is automatically one level higher, a monster with abilities switched out to make it more powerful should probably have a higher CR (assuming its CR was originally accurate).

If the players in a game I run optimize their PCs, I will generally assume that they are indirectly telling me that they want an easy game unless specifically told otherwise. This isn't always the case, but seems to have worked reasonably well so far.

If PCs want a challenge for optimized characters, I'll give them opportunities to face larger numbers of enemies and/or higher-CR ones. Mercenary warbands of trolls that include decent mages and tacticians have been my favorite higher-grade challenge so far.