The Gaming Den

Awesome to Behold [Skill]
You are truly awesome to behold. This is a skill feat that scales with your ranks in Intimidate.
Prerequisites: At least 6 hit dice
Benefits:
0 ranks: You gain immunity to fear.
9 ranks: You gain Frightful Presence out to 10' per hit die. Whenever you fly overhead, attack, charge, or do anything dramatic, all creatures with fewer hit dice than you in that radius must make a Will save (DC 9 + 1/2 your Intimidate ranks + your Charisma modifier). Creatures that succeed are immune to your Frightful Presence for 24 hours. Creatures that fail and have at most five hit dice and that you have at least four hit dice more than are frightened. Other creatures are shaken. These effects last for 5d6 rounds. Creatures cannot be affected while your Frightful Presence again while under its effects. Other creatures with Frightful Presence are immune to your Frightful Presence, and you are immune to Frightful Presence.
14 ranks: You are so awe-inspiring as to strike creatures blind. Any creature within close range whose hit dice are at most your level - 5 who sees you must make a Will save (same DC as for Frightful Presence) or be struck blind. Creatures with Blindsight or Blindsense based on echolocation that locate you with those are struck deaf in the same way. Other creatures who narrow your position down to your space with Blindsight, Blindsense, Scent, or Tremorsense lose such senses until restored with at least a Remove Blindness/Deafness spell (which restores exotic senses lost in this way). These abilities only affect creatures within close range, whose hit dice at at most your level - 5, who fail a Will save. A successful save grants a chance to avert one's senses, even if they don't normally avert, but focusing them again runs this risk every round.
19 ranks: You are so awesome that creatures literally die from it, or so ugly things turn to stone, or so weird in geometry that creatures just go insane. Whatever it is, looking at you is not medically-advised for the weak of heart. When you gain this ability, select one of the following: Death, Insanity, or Transformation; if you select Transformation, you must select a material (stone, ash, ice, and salt are common choices; with DM approval, you can select odder things, like gold). Any creature that would lose a sense from this feat's 14 rank ability, whose hit dice are at most your level - 10, must make a Fortitude save (usually) against the same DC or suffer that effect: death kills living creatures and destroys undead and constructs, Insanity requires a will save instead of a fortitude and functions as the spell, and transformation turns creatures to the selected material, as Flesh to Stone. Once you choose the effect of this ability, it cannot be changed except through retraining.
Special: None of the abilities of this feat may be suppressed while in your natural form. If your Disguise ranks are at least equal to your Intimidate Ranks - 5, you may use a disguise to suppress these abilities (they take full effect on anyone who sees through it). A Disguise Self spell, Polymorphing or Alternate Form effect, or the Harmless Form feat suppresses these abilities automatically.

(Roughly) covers PCs who want to be Nymphs, greek gods, or Cthulhu.

Let me get this straight. I set a feat slot, on fire, and get the dubious pleasure to not affect my enemies in anything close to a level appropriate manner? None of the abilites affect things of your level, hell most of the abilities are only good for Mooks you stopped caring about 5 levels ago! Providing level appropriate abilities is the whole point of scaling feats. So as it stands? Pass.

You need to put in a 4 rank ability.

What? Frightful Presence is fucking awesome.

I think the feat is too long, personally. Too much text. Each ability shouldn't get a paragraph, it should get a couple sentences at most.

Hicks wrote:Let me get this straight. I set a feat slot, on fire, and get the dubious pleasure to not affect my enemies in anything close to a level appropriate manner? None of the abilites affect things of your level, hell most of the abilities are only good for Mooks you stopped caring about 5 levels ago! Providing level appropriate abilities is the whole point of scaling feats. So as it stands? Pass.

You need to put in a 4 rank ability.

It's definitley good for when you're used tp facing lots of mooks. Like if your DM has a fetish for zurg rushes.

God_of_Awesome wrote:

Hicks wrote:Let me get this straight. I set a feat slot, on fire, and get the dubious pleasure to not affect my enemies in anything close to a level appropriate manner? None of the abilites affect things of your level, hell most of the abilities are only good for Mooks you stopped caring about 5 levels ago! Providing level appropriate abilities is the whole point of scaling feats. So as it stands? Pass.

You need to put in a 4 rank ability.

It's definitley good for when you're used tp facing lots of mooks. Like if your DM has a fetish for zurg rushes.

And if not, it's balls. The +19 is a fluff ability. It needs something else on top of it to make the feat worth taking.

As far as I know, the 9-rank ability is level appropriate.

10+4+stat is about as good as any save that the are thrown at as mean.

And you can up this with stat boosters just like other save-or-sucks.

While it's not going to win the battle for you, it certainly seems to start.

-Crissa

Awesome to Behold
You are truly awesome to behold. This is a skill feat that scales with your ranks in Intimidate.
Prerequisites: At least 6 hit dice
0 ranks: You gain immunity to fear.
4 ranks: You gain a gaze attack which forces creatures to make a Will save (DC 9 + 1/2 your Intimidate ranks + your Charisma modifier) or be treated as if it were fascinated as they look on in horror/awe/incomprehension for untill you stop gazing at them. If they are frightened or panicked, they begin to cower instead of fleeing.
9 ranks: You gain Frightful Presence out to 10' per character level. All creatures within this radius must make a Will save (DC 9 + 1/3 your Intimidate ranks + your Charisma modifier) each turn or become one step more frightened (normal to shaken to frightened to panicked). A successful save renders the creature immune to this effect for 24 hours, as long as they are not already frightened or worse.
14 ranks: Your gaze attack now causes fascinated victims to be struck blind and deaf to everything except for you. They are treated as blind, except that they are still effected by your Frightful Presence and gaze attack.
19 ranks: All creatures within range of your Frightful Presence that fail their save against your Frightful Presence are struck dead, afflicted with Insanity as per the spell or transformed into stone as Flesh to Stone. Once you choose the effect of this ability, it cannot be changed except through retraining.
Special: None of the abilities of this feat may be suppressed without a successful disguise check while in your natural form. Creatures must be able to see you to be effected by this feat.

I like Grek's update a lot. good flavor and use since it grants options, and interesting effects. I am kind of worried about the fact that the frightful presences as worded makes it effect allies too.

Grek's rewrite is much better than the original. Taking out the copying of the Frightful presence rules was a good idea.

One question, though; why does the DC for the Frightful Presence scale more slowly than normal (1/3 ranks, so 1 per three instead of the usual 1 per two). Is it to make the high-end not work so well on level-appropriate encounters? A passive area save-or-die is not level appropriate against level-appropriate monsters at any level, so I can see the save DC nerf.

The six hit dice prereq was mostly a way of getting around writing a 4-rank ability, so as a complete feat it doesn't even need the prereq (although a first-level character being awesome to behold raises some questions; still, this is a world where gods run around and impregnate mortals, so this is fully plausible).

Also, I agree that there should be something for allies if it affects things of your hit dice. In my version I left that out on the assumption that the other PCs would be the same level as any PC taking this feat, but if it could potentially affect the PCs that should be stopped, probably by giving a limited number of people auto-immunity.

Alternately, other PCs could just be assumed to practice against the effect until immune every day, with appropriate protections from people with at least 19 ranks. That might actually be the simplest way to handle it.

It's also a helluva lot less wordy. Power to that.

IGTN wrote:One question, though; why does the DC for the Frightful Presence scale more slowly than normal (1/3 ranks, so 1 per three instead of the usual 1 per two). Is it to make the high-end not work so well on level-appropriate encounters? A passive area save-or-die is not level appropriate against level-appropriate monsters at any level, so I can see the save DC nerf.

What I wonder is, wouldn't it just be easier to use Hit Dice instead of Intimidate ranks and use the standard formula? I mean, the feat already scales by Intimidate ranks in the first place, so you need at least 9 ranks to use the ability, and ranks are directly capped by Hit Dice.

IGTN wrote:One question, though; why does the DC for the Frightful Presence scale more slowly than normal (1/3 ranks, so 1 per three instead of the usual 1 per two). Is it to make the high-end not work so well on level-appropriate encounters? A passive area save-or-die is not level appropriate against level-appropriate monsters at any level, so I can see the save DC nerf.

Yes. it's 1/3 instead of 1/2 ranks so it only kills on mooks.

Probably for the best to have a note in the Special: section that lets people become used to you and not instantly die upon waking up in the morning to see you cooking breakfast.

Grek wrote:Probably for the best to have a note in the Special: section that lets people become used to you and not instantly die upon waking up in the morning to see you cooking breakfast.

Could it be as simple as "if someone succeeds their saving throw against this effect, they are immune. They must still make a saving throw against someone else with this ability."?

That, and perhaps you can render certain people immune to the effect (like your friends, the guy you're buying a beer from, and the dude you paid to make you a magic sword).

Once you're level 16, most of the people you interact with are going to have immunities. Your friends can get used to you and immune to your death aura, but it still works even if they can't. They just need to go around with general immunity to however your death aura works (instakill, petrify, insanity, whatever). So does the guy you buys swords from. The guy who gets you your beer is an efreeti at that level, so he, too, has to be immune to death auras. At that level, all of your peers need to be immune to the kinds of stuff you throw because of teleport ambushes.

That, or instant death can use the full save DC and have a hit die cap put back on to reduce it to a room-clearing effect; level-appropriate enemies and peers don't die just from looking at you, but mooks do. Of course, anything that affects level-appropriate swarming enemies also affects cohorts, but cohorts can be given immunity items. The original was underpowered because I was comparing it to Blasphemy (essentially, an auto-blasphemy every round, and I mistook Blasphemy for a more powerful standalone (as opposed to CL-enhanced) spell than it was)

If you need to interact with mortals, a Hat of Disguise is cheap, and Harmless Form only costs a feat and synergizes well with other feats that fit the concept here (like Huge Size). Either one protects mortals from you.

I think the aura pushing people to *frightened* in 2 rounds, passively, is a little too good, not to mention pulsing the aura every tick adds too many die rolls.