The Gaming Den

A friend of mine is talking about wanting to try Gnorman's E6 material from GITP I looked at his first kick at the can and some of it looked ok but some really underpowered classes. It's a work in progress but does anyone else have any thoughts on his general balance? Is it worth following or does he seem to be out to lunch?

Can you elaborate? Underpowered compared to what metric, the Tome classes, an optimised Rogue, or what? The classes presented are strictly superior to a single class Fighter, but that's... kind of difficult to *not* achieve.

I know for a fact the archetypes aren't all well balanced against eachother at all levels, as IIRC that statement's weak enough that I only need one counterexample, namely Cenobite vs Martial Artist - "Instead of being a full BaB Swordsage who can count as unarmed under circumstances that aren't actually being unarmed, you get Lay on Hands!" Still I'm no 3.5 expert, and I'm sure this will result in entertaining deconstruction if poked by people who are.

Oh, and Necromancer gets a Corpsecrafter feat without calling it a Corpsecrafter feat, only they can't actually create undead without DMM Fell Animate until 5th level so it's not as likely to come up.

In any case I'd just be a Black Mage Void Cultist and say "Hey monsters, I know we said we'd top out at level 6, but I decided to take Black Tentacles anyway. Why? Because fuck you, that's why."

It looks pretty boring. It's like "here are a bunch of powers where you get minor bonuses to things."

Basically its the lazy design that you see in bad splatbooks and homebrew. You can literally write that all that content in an afternoon.

The archtype thing is also really annoying.

And would you do that with an Allip familiar that can solo almost everything, or with a Shadow Familiar that can solo almost everything?

I think that the perfect example of how this material is a waste of time is his Magi Golem.

• It's a CR 25 creature. Even if it was vaguely appropriate for it to be that level, it's still level 25 and thus completely fucking worthless in all games.
• But of course, it's actually not a level appropriate enemy, since it has bullshit defenses and bullshit hit points and its death ray doesn't do enough damage to drop any character in even 2 hits even without healing.
• The whole deal is that it's supposed to take damage from non-magical weapons and be immune to magic weapons, but it is fucking incorporeal and non-magic weapons cannot hit that fucker, regardless of what kind of damage they do or do not do!

It's one of those monster writeups that we'd give endless amounts of shit to if it showed up in an official document. Showing up in a pile of scattershot house rules, it just provokes eye-rolling and the lack of interest in the rest of the product.

-Username17

Kaelik wrote:And would you do that with an Allip familiar that can solo almost everything, or with a Shadow Familiar that can solo almost everything?

When in doubt I always take the one people can't pronounce.

I've found it hard to read so I lost interest. None of the names stuck with me. If it was only 'Fighter, Mage, Thief' in the writeup that would've been dandy. (there was at the end so I read a bit of that)

Have you seen Djinn in Tonic's E6 classes? They're pretty simple to grasp.

FrankTrollman wrote:I think that the perfect example of how this material is a waste of time is his Magi Golem.

• It's a CR 25 creature. Even if it was vaguely appropriate for it to be that level, it's still level 25 and thus completely fucking worthless in all games.
• But of course, it's actually not a level appropriate enemy, since it has bullshit defenses and bullshit hit points and its death ray doesn't do enough damage to drop any character in even 2 hits even without healing.
• The whole deal is that it's supposed to take damage from non-magical weapons and be immune to magic weapons, but it is fucking incorporeal and non-magic weapons cannot hit that fucker, regardless of what kind of damage they do or do not do!

It's one of those monster writeups that we'd give endless amounts of shit to if it showed up in an official document. Showing up in a pile of scattershot house rules, it just provokes eye-rolling and the lack of interest in the rest of the product.

-Username17

Uh, there's no Magi Golem in this E6 Compendium. There is a Magi Golem that matches your description in the houserules that Virgil's DM wants to use, but there's nothing of the sort in that link upthread. In any case, a CR 25 monster would be pretty fucking stupid to have in an E6 game.

Oog. You're right. I had opened two links to GitP "pile of shitty house rules" and got totally confused as to which was which. I must hang my head in shame now.

Gnorman's is the one where there are "E6" classes that all have a crap tonne of extra abilities at every level and the Warrior types get a bunch of warrior class features and the caster types get to have a fiendish companion that is more powerful than the warriors and also gets spells.

It's procedurally generated material where each "archetype" gets an arbitrary pile of powers from various existent classes. And well, some of those are high level abilities and some of those are broken abilities, and a lot of them are just crap. I don't understand what the point of this work is either. There is no balance point I can see, and clearly more effort was spent finding pictures on the WotC webhost than on actually designing the classes.

-Username17

It's a wall of noise project by the look of it. Face enough disorganised raw data and your brain basically surrenders and agrees to like it.

Uh, yeh, most of that should be selectable feats/powers, then he could have a nice set of classes. Too specific, inflexible, and too much of it. Sort of misses the point of E6 that way.

I haven't played them, but I like Djinn in Tonic's writeups

(incomplete) magic stuff
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109833

warrior guys
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80811


They're easy to read and follow a standard format. I'd like to try them out.

Re: companions that are better than warriors.

Alright, confession time: I actually didn't notice that crap immediately because my half-assed sorting algorithm* led me to initially skip familiars and their ilk. Still, I'm happy I made that mistake because at one point I found myself looking at the Void Cultist and thinking "Well, early Black Tentacles in a game where boss monsters should be capping out below cr10, Animate Dead and Stinking Cloud is pretty much about enough to justify my existence on their own, but what could I do that's equally stupid when dealing with big dumb bruisers with nice fort saves?". That extra bit of context made checking the thread and seeing Kaelik's "Would you like a side of Strength or Wisdom drain with that incorporeal?" post about a million times funnier.

*Basically, I assumed caster>melee then only checked spell lists if the capstones were good AND the archetype name implied that you'd get battle field shapers and vicious debuffs instead of just a grab bag of abjurations, blasts and other shit I don't care about. In my defense, I feel like that was already more consideration than it ended up deserving.

It's not just the Shadows and Allips. If you grab a bruiser familiar, you get Large Scorpion, upgraded to being a magical beast, so it has a +5 BAB. That's a +5 to-hit and an additional +2 on the grapples, as well as getting d10 hit dice. It's better at holding ground than the party brawler.

-Username17

Revisiting this to give credit it where it's due: apparently this Gnorman fellow noticed this thread and rather than coming over here and whining about meanies he actually skipped straight to the re-evaluation phase and started changing things up. I haven't read this thing thoroughly yet but I thought I'd mention it given that some people may in fact be bored enough to offer more criticism given that it's apparently just not being shouted into the void.