The Gaming Den

Hiya, fairly new to these forums, so forgive me if this is in the wrong section.

So, I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy lately, specifically FF6. Having never played an FF game before, I was fascinated by the blue magic of Strago, the pseudo-blue not-magic of Gau, and the mimicry of Gogo. Does anyone know of a decent D&D class along the lines of copying enemy abilities?

Also: I am aware that the WotC boards have a blue mage, but it runs into a couple problems: players aren't exposed to enough enemy magic in the form of spells, and it has the same spells as a traditional spellcaster (rather than abilities that can only be gained by either being a monster or being a blue mage).

Frank has an build around here somewhere (Actually, it's in the same thread as the Wish and the Word, I believe) for totally abusing Shapechange to overlap immunities and be basically immune to everything.

However, as a class, you'd have a few obstacles...

1) Getting hit by an ability would not be that great a way to gain it in DnD.

2) Rationing abilities. Do you use go to a per-day usage, or as the monster uses it? Do you also gain spell-likes, or just supernaturals? What about extraordinary abilities?

3) Do you want to make this your main shtick, or would you back it up with casting progression? Heck, you could even sacrifice spell slots for abilities.

Well I have been thinking about making one myself, but the main issue I've come across is balancing abilities. Since monster abilities don't generally have spell levels unless they are spells (or spell-likes), there's really no codifiable way to measure their strength. As for getting hit, I agree totally. That's why I was thinking more along the lines of Gau or Gogo than Strago.

Maxus, there are ways around this. I was sketching down some thoughts for this class, and I basically realised that you would need to do the following:

1) Genuinely make the class feel like it's replicating the abilities of the monster

This does not mean a direct conversion. Quite a few abilities are out-and-out broken when given to PCs. Additionally, this cannot be transformational, as the Voltron effect is really, really bad when applied to PCs, which is something that Frank has said.

2) Not make this 'just another caster'

Throwing down a list of SLAs or spells and letting them go nuts isn't really the point - a transmuter wizard can do this anyway.

3) Make the monster abilities the key point of the class, and have acquisition based on knowledge (not necessarily the skill, although that's a start), not being hit by stuff

Essentially, the whole point behind the blue mage is that these guys fight LIKE monsters. You need to know how a monster fights in order to fight like it, but being hit need not be a requisite.

Essentially, what we're looking at is some kind of totemist, except not crummy and using a subsystem which is less opaque than incarnum. I'm working on this idea right now, but unfortunately, am a bit uninspired (goddamn relationships and their BS).

I was thinking about how to avoid being hit by them, too, and I was thinking about judging supernatural abilities by the CR of the monster that has them (for a start); studying monsters would be a way to do it (maybe they can have K (Zoology) as a skill). You could also judge them by about how strong they are.

However, someone fighting more like a monster does is what Gau does; or maybe a Morpher from FFTA.

Which, admittedly, is a cool idea and one I may pursue, but not what Daniel Draco wants. (Although using the soul of a critter to gain its abilities would be awesome).

Anyway, the Blue Mage can gain monster abilities by some arcane means. Maybe filling slots/types (breath weapons, buffs, debuffs, weird shit? Dunno. I'd have to look at monster entries and see if there's some common stuff).

OK, first off, creating new skills is a no-no.

Secondly, what you propose is basically either a sphere-based caster or just a wizard full stop. Seriously, I can't see enough monster abilities that are truly unique to justify a whole new class on that basis alone.

Mister_Sinister wrote:OK, first off, creating new skills is a no-no.

Secondly, what you propose is basically either a sphere-based caster or just a wizard full stop. Seriously, I can't see enough monster abilities that are truly unique to justify a whole new class on that basis alone.

This is the Den. We examine no-no's to try to see if there's any reason and discard them if there isn't. Point is, if you had a knowledge-based acquisition of abilities, you'd almost have to have some way to just identify monsters, seeing as how the writers decided to spread them through all the Knowledges.

In any case, I invite you to trawl through the fiends and undead; there's a lot of weird abilities in there. The Kyton's a good example, with the ability to control chains AND, for some reason, make faces at people.

Besides, the Blue Mage class is all about taking the weird-ass monster abilities.

The first monster I pulled up (at random) had this:

Trill (Su): A frost worm can emit a noise that forces its prey to stand motionless. This sonic mind-affecting compulsion affects all creatures other than frost worms within a 100-foot radius. Creatures must succeed on a DC 17 Will save or be stunned for as long as the worm trills and for 1d4 rounds thereafter, even if they are attacked. However, if attacked or violently shaken (a full-round action), a victim is allowed another saving throw. Once a creature has resisted or broken the effect, it cannot be affected again by that same frost worm’s trill for 24 hours. The effect’s caster level is 14th. The save DC is Charisma-based.

A class that learns its abilities from the monsters it fights would vary significantly depending on the monsters it encounters in a game. A higher-level character would need some balanced way of determining the monsters it had already encountered. These could be problems.

However, with that said, I could easily see a warrior that could select a number of abilities off a premade pool based on monster abilities each level. Two ways of doing this present themselves:

- Something like a sphere-based caster, but with suites of extraordinary and supernatural abilities. Maybe each "sphere" represents a monster archetype.
- Tiered pools of abilities organized like the fighting styles of a Tome monk.

Once you have the ability pool, if it's diverse and balanced enough, you could grab abilities connected to the monsters you fought in a vaguely believable fashion. Maybe give a mechanic where you can suddenly learn a new ability in the place of an old one once or twice an adventure.

Maxus, point taken, but I don't see a need to create a new Knowledge skill when we have perfectly workable ones to identify monsters already.

As for those ideas - sure, point taken, but that kind of character would be more like a melee dude (a la what Av suggested) than a caster IMHO.

Mister_Sinister wrote:Maxus, point taken, but I don't see a need to create a new Knowledge skill when we have perfectly workable ones to identify monsters already.

Having different variety of monsters covered under skills is fine for general purposes and gives a reason for diversifying knowledges among a group; however, a single character doesn't have the skill points to cover all of them. Every knowledge skill (or most of them) is required for some variety of monster.

That's a lot of skill points down the drain right there; anyway, I was thinking more of it being a class feature. Or maybe they get a Bestiary or something (I'd like an ability called "Yep, that's a dragon", for example). Beside it would help increase the idea that the Blue Mage (or whatever this is called) doesn't give a fuck about theological disputation or lines of magic lore or amazing facts about phosphoric slime mold. He has a deep personal interest in undead, dragons, and aberrations. So I'd like to give him the option of specializing in just that--the monsters.

The best faith attempt at this that WotC put out was the Totemist, which ironically is Blue.

Here are the constraints leveled upon you by D&D as far as Blue Magic is concerned:

• You can't give out powers based on encountering or not encountering specific enemies. You can go up in level fighting Gorgons and Basilisks or you can level up fighting Goblin Fighters.
• You can't give out the ability to dumpster dive through the whole monster manual and get powers based on any line item rubric. Too many of the line items are horribly broken when taken in isolation or in combination with other line items. Even if we believed that the monsters were balanced (which they are not), the fact is that many monsters have big powers and big weaknesses, and a line item grab will take the powers alone.

So really what you are going to want to do is to write up a series of supernatural abilities that are reminiscent of specific monsters, and then let the Blue Mage character grab those and use them. Like a Totemist. Only hopefully less stupid.

-Username17

It is worth noting that even in Final Fantasy games, blue mages and mimics can't copy arbitrary enemy powers--blue mages get a sanitized hand-picked subset of enemy skills, and mimics can only duplicate things that their allies can already do, so under no circumstance can you duplicate the BBEG's omega strike or some BS puzzle monster ability.

So pretty much what other people in the thread said. Blue mages (Strago) should get access to a specific list of abilities that are based on (or thematically similar to) monster abilities--and for balance reasons, they should have a specific number of them that are not selected based on what monsters they happened to encounter.

Gau could probably be emulated using something like the Dungeonomicon's Polymorph Version 2, where you are completely replaced by an appropriate-CR monster exactly as it appears in the monster book (without carrying over your intelligence, spell effects, or any of that stuff). You could probably change the special effect so that you still look like yourself, if you want.

Mimics (Gogo) should probably only copy effects from party members (it requires intimate familiarity with a willing target being mimicked or some such). And as mimicry is generally an intentionally abusable super-ability even in Final Fantasy games, you'd probably want to attach some meaningful cost or disadvantage if you want it to be balanced.

Alright, so I'm hearing that the best way to go about monster magic is to basically remake the totemist. I like that idea, since the totemist was a good idea, but was attached to a subsystem that was badly made. Totemist abilities would probably work better similarly to a WotC warlock. Instead of getting an eldritch blast, it would focus on the invocations, possibly getting more of them than a warlock and maybe even being able to prepare different ones daily, like spells. Of course, the invocations would have to be made more useful than a warlock's.

I haven't seen the Totemist, so I can't comment on it.

Personally, I like the idea of new Tome Monk fighting style abilities that are similar to monster abilities. There wouldn't be as huge a variety of abilities immediately available to individuals, but it would be easy to implement and allows for an active and passive ability to both be used in the same turn. This would allow a character to use "Draconic Displacer Beast Stance" for a miss chance combined with lightning breath or "Suspiciously Attractive Balor Fu" and sing so beautifully (harpy) that all your foes can do is run into your flame aura.

There was a rather good Blue Mage class posted on the WotC messageboard a long, long time ago. Lemme find it... here:

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=137596

mythSSK wrote:There was a rather good Blue Mage class posted on the WotC messageboard a long, long time ago. Lemme find it... here:

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=137596

That's really not a very good class; it was already rather well established that you can't just give out its abilities exclusively based on what you do and do not encounter. Another problem is that it's limited to what already qualifies as magic, which isn't "blue magic" (i.e. stuff based on what is normally exclusive to monsters rather than just what's already on other guys' spell lists) at all. And that's no fun. It suffers from a lot of the same problems the Archivist has as well. Really, the whole thing's just inferior to other spellcasters unless you rely on your DM to give you a hand or hire other spellcasters to cast stuff on you all day. In either case it's pretty tedious.

I'm thinking a Blue Mage should end up having some sort of really really big list of level-appropriate "blue spells" available to it at different levels that are based on abilities of different monsters. You'd gain stuff from this list either by experiencing it directly (to keep with the flavour of what it's based off of and as a bit of a bonus) OR by some alternative means; perhaps it would add two each level, and learn them from another class feature, or scrolls, or any number of other possibilities.

Also, hi. First post.

You have a good point; the main problem would be making up the list.

Also, welcome aboard.