The Gaming Den

Koumei at [unixtime wrote:1186974796[/unixtime]]I imagine there are the few, the proud.

Koumei at [unixtime wrote:1187053693[/unixtime]]Yes, they seriously did just spend a hundred odd posts arguing that. This makes baby Raptor Jesus cry.

Leress wrote:
The last few pages are really painful.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1187062237[/unixtime]]
He changed the rules so that Vorpal Swords aren't worth having on he grounds that the only high level builds you ever saw that bothered swinging swords at all were based upon swinging crit-enhanced vorpal swords at people and he wanted people to swing axes and do damage instead. Well boo-fucking-hoo! It turns out that the reason people did that is because you can't possibly hope to accomplish jack or shit at 17th level against an adventuring party of evil Storm Giants with he pissant damage you do out of a fucking axe! All nerfing the only viable high level Fighter build did was make there not be any viable high level Fighter Builds. I could have told you that. In fact, I did.

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1187072003[/unixtime]]
But the bigger problem is that 'damage' is useless when the wizard is slinging area effect save or die spells.

tzor at [unixtime wrote:1187093423[/unixtime]]Vorpal really is a legacy of the old 1E days where rare random death was common. It seems out of place in 3E and it seems even more out of place as a common weapon enhancement.

bitnine wrote:The Vorpal Example

First off, this is mainly to examine the resource features that vorpal excellently represents - not to evaluate vorpal's effectiveness, or lack thereof. Actually, I will come to that later. But it is a great way to think about situational usefulness and its features and impact. I have heard from some DMs who fudged things so that their 'boss' encounter didn't end straight off from a vorpal hit - or they handed out less experience from a quickly ended fight in this manner. That's pretty rough, and here's a chunk of why:

That vorpal sword doesn't really provide a benefit so much as shift things. Every fight in which the vorpal feature did not activate was a little bit tougher. For the purposes of that encounter, your character was a +5 enchantment in the hole (or the wealth value thereof). You got hurt a little more, your enemies had a better chance of escaping, maybe a party member died - but its clear for the purposes of those encounters you would have been better served by at least 70,000 effectively allocated gp . I would imagine that you didn't get additional experience points for all of those battles, either. (You might as well count in here all the times that the vorpal enchantment activated when it didn't make a difference, either.)

So in a flash the vorpal ability expends in a nova all of its accrued benefit that is has gained by leeching your effectiveness over the course of the battles where it sucked. It explodes with the pent-up energy of a dozen battles of a +5 enchantment doing nothing productive. And maybe you move the game along a little more that session or get to get home a little earlier or somesuch.

I dunno, but it seems like this is a real bad deal. I mean, as a DM, encouraging randomly applying novas that can trivialize certain encounters doesn't seem particularly fun or good for game flow, and that's outside a balance concern. I mean, yeah, it can happen and a good DM can deal, but I dunno why you'd want to encourage it like that. And as a player, vorpal usually sorta sucks walnuts straight out of the shell. (I'm sure you can finesse a build that's dedicated to making 50 attacks for -1 damage to trigger the ability, but hows about discounting that as de minimis.) Plus I figure that a fight over so quickly might well have the DM insert a new encounter and/or retcon down the challenge of the old one. Ow - I do understand some of that in keeping the game running, but ain't it a bitch to get double slapped? I mean, I actually paid in a few different ways for a vorpal sword that isn't really worth it, and even when it finally worked it didn't really.

Vorpal is near the high end of situational abilities, with the added feature of having its situational usefulness be random. Its problems can be seen reflected in many others of its ilk to a much lesser extent. And its a great basis for comparison. While I think there probably are some situationally applying benefits that work, its handy to be able to look at many such abilities and realize that they are worse than vorpal. At least then you can realize that heavy cases shouldn't take up much feature space on a class level.

wrote:Life Points (Su): A person has only so many days to live on this world. Once their time among the living is up, nothing can stop the soul from moving on to the afterlife. A bio-mage can spend their remaining time of life in the future to produce magical effects today. This is done by using Life Points.

wrote:Bio-Bomb (Sp): At 20th level, a bio-mage has learned to use the energy within him to detonate himself in a destructive & lethal explosion. As a standard action, a bio-mage can spend his entire remaining LP to release a deadly blast, centered on his own body. This attack deals damage to all within the blast radius equal to his remaining LP divided by 100. All of those caught within the explosion can make a successful Reflex save (DC15) for half damage. The size of this explosive effect is a 30’ radius, centered on the bio-mage. This attack is always fatal to the bio-mage, whose body is completely disintegrated, leaving absolutely no trace remaining. Since the body is utterly destroyed & completely spent of LP, resurrection of any sort is impossible.

Regeneration [Special] [Epic]
• You regain some of the LP that you have lost.
• Prerequisite: Bio-mage only, Bio-Bomb ability
• Benefit: After resting for a full day, you can regain your class level × your Constitution modifier. This can be done as often as you wish, but it must be a full day’s rest. You may engage in light, non-strenuous travel or activity, but any combat or spellcasting prevents you from regaining LP that day. If you undergo complete bed rest (doing nothing for an entire day), you recover LP equal to (1.5 × your class level × your Constitution bonus, minimum 1). You cannot gain more LP than you started with at 1st level (your starting Constitution score × 5,000).

Cielingcat at [unixtime wrote:1187385664[/unixtime]]What Blizzard puts out as a joke, D&D players invent for real.

What the fuck?

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1187389457[/unixtime]]

"×" is what? It's used like four times in the Regeneration text Rob quoted.