Break me a Warlock.

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User3
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by User3 »


JD wrote:might also question why the Warlock's designer, had he intended such a seemingly quintessential Warlock ability to be available, would then leave it out of the book which has a high degree of reprinted material anyway..


You did see the part where I mentioned that the designers were not on the ball, right?

JD wrote:
On the other side of the coin, I might wonder why, if no other spellcaster would be afforded a feat that has him automatically defeat spell resistance, automatically cast defensively, automatically cast without concentrating and without possibility of his spell being disrupted if he takes damage, and cast spells that can never be dispelled or counterspelled; why the warlock should be afforded such luxury with a feat he can take at level 1.


Well, regular spellcasters get access to like 20 metamagic feats and counting(and associated rods) that can be added to all their spells, and they can use about 95% of all arcane PrCs, and they can get +DC feats for entire classes of spells, so it seems that Warlocks are getting screwed even if they get Supernatural Transformation. I'm not even going to mention that Warlocks get like 30 possible effects ever while spellcasters get hundreds of spells to choose from, and the chance to research more if they get bored.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Zherog »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1102112169[/unixtime]]Did I never tell you guys about "Hungry Jack"? He was a human rogue, who took his 10th level bonus feat as "Gape of the Serpent" - which is totally legal because he can take any feat he wants and doesn't have to meet prereqs as it is a bonus feat.


Could you explain, please? I've never noticed that bonus feats don't require you to meet the pre-reqs. Here's my guess.

SRD, under Rogue wrote:Feat: A rogue may gain a bonus feat in place of a special ability.


SRD, under Fighter wrote:Bonus Feats: At 1st level, a fighter gets a bonus combat-oriented feat ... . A fighter must still meet all prerequisites for a bonus feat, including ability score and base attack bonus minimums.


So, because the Fighter explicitly states that the character must qualify, while the rogue doesn't, it means you don't need to meet the pre-reqs when taking a feat with the rogue special ability.

Did I get close, at least?
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by User3 »

There's a thread here a bunch of pages back that discusses the issue of rogue bonus feats in exacting detail. See [counturl=5]here.[/counturl]

--d.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Jonathan_Drain »

It's another of those letter-of-the-rule literal readings. The kind that make it legal warlock to buff himself to add +900 to Bluff checks each morning.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by RandomCasualty »

Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1102113974[/unixtime]]You know, I get the people who say, "This stuff is obviously broken, and I'd never allow it in my game." I really do. I often do the same thing, although, depending on what kind of game I want, it's sometimes just more entertaining to let people break stuff.

But I don't get the people who say "This stuff is obviously broken, and I'd never allow it in my game, and because I can do that it's okay to just leave it that way." I really don't.

If it's broken, you fix it. Sticking the pieces back together and wrapping Scotch tape around them and then pretending like it's not actually broken is bad game design, and no amount of solemn debate about "the intent of the rules" can change that, if only because no two people are ever going to have exactly the same notion of what "the intent of the rules" is.

--d.


Well there's a point where the DM has to take over and do some careful adjudication especially with interaction of different things.

Because I think in a game that's always growing we can't expect all the bugs to ever be worked out. When books are constantly being produced and we have huge influxes of both official and unofficial material, there will always be loopholes getting through.

And sadly enough I think WotC can print the material faster than we can fix it fully.

Fixing the core is a worthy effort, but I've long given up on trying to patch up every splatbook and supplement out there, because you can't. There's so much you're forced to just handle things on a case by case basis.

Simply put, knowing the rules are broken is empowering knowledge enough to enable your game to run smoothly. The real danger is to ever think mindless RAW can work, and to ever put yourself as a DM in a position to be enslaved by that odd belief. This isn't a game that can be played like Magic: the gathering or Risk... it's just far far too complex to ever try to eliminate the human element.

And that's the realization that has to be reached ultimately.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by User3 »

As a matter of practicality there will always be some things left out of the rules or left unaddressed that the DM will have to handle. And of course there will always be things someone regards as "broken" in any set of rules imaginable.

Which is an excellent reason not to play by the absolute letter of the rules -- but not a good reason to fix broken things; the fact that we can't expect the exact letter of the rules to be playable and balanced every time doesn't mean we should stop trying to make them as playable and balanced as we can.

If something appears broken -- suggest a fix; retreating behind the "that's obviously broken" defense doesn't help make it otherwise.

--d.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by RandomCasualty »

Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1102127952[/unixtime]]
If something appears broken -- suggest a fix; retreating behind the "that's obviously broken" defense doesn't help make it otherwise.


Well sure, the point I'm making is that it's often not worth the trouble to go through actually fixing stuff until you need to. Mainly because you'd have a 200 page book of house rules. You dont' want to type it and your players don't want to read it, so why bother?

It's not that you don't fix it, it'sjust that you don't worry about it until you have to fix it.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Username17 »

Quite often, I find the best fix for a new idea in a sourcebook is the red pen or the bic lighter. I don't use the PrCs out of the books. At all. Every single PrC I ever allow in any of my games is one I write myself and I write them in a "fire and forget" manner for the specific use of a single player in a single campaign. It's a lot of work, but it's less work to write between zero and three PrCs for every player in every game I run than it is to attempt to overhaul the hundreds upon hundreds of unbalanced whackamajigs available in various printed sources. Plus, it acts as a beautifully effective stealth nerf/fix for characters who are over/under performing.

There's no way to "fix" the Thought Bottle. It just can't be done. Sure, XP costs and level loss are bad for game balance, and the thought bottle gets rid of them, but it does so in the bad touch way - where you end up having to tearfully explain the experience to a social worker. The whole idea of giving people "save points" is retarded. It either becomes completely metagamey and useless, or it becomes completely broketastic - and it has no middle ground. The best way to fix it is to defenestrate it.

Just don't add things to your game unless you're willing to put the effort into them to make them balanced. If something can't be made balanced - don't ever let it into your game. In general, allowing in new rules whole books at a time is a bad plan, and everything after Sword and Fist has upgraded that plan to straight up disaster.

---

But there's a flip side. If you do let in a rule, and then you change it without consultation in the middle of a game session, then you're the asshole. That's why you have to be careful what you're letting in before you do it.

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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by RandomCasualty »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1102147117[/unixtime]]
But there's a flip side. If you do let in a rule, and then you change it without consultation in the middle of a game session, then you're the asshole. That's why you have to be careful what you're letting in before you do it.


Sometimes people don't fully understand what a rule can do, and every nuance and little bug. The game shouldn't be about trying to pull a fast one on your DM and winning if you get away with it.

If you plan on using the warlock's incantation to cast it over and over again for a +600 bonus, the smart thing to do is check wtih your DM before you do that. Because it's likely he never thought of that use when he agreed to let it in. If you don't ask him about that and then suddenly try to exploit the loophole in the middle of a session, then you're deliberately being sneaky. You know that your DM would nerf it or ban it if he knew about that loophole. So you've kept an ace up your sleeve that you know your DM probably didn't know about and you deliberately kept it secret in an effort to pull a fast one by him.

If you do something like that in an actual game, you have no right to be calling anyone other than yourself an asshole.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Jonathan_Drain »

Suppose a DM were to allow a player to take Warlock, knowing that +6 to Bluff all day is nice and balanced. Now suppose that the player, having read on the Internet of this nigh-infinite bluff bonus bug, proceeds to cast it for an hour, and when the DM questions it, he tells his DM that it's perfectly rulesworthy.

Were it my choice, I'd immediately step in and say "Look, you can't do that. If you can do that, you can get plus a zillion to Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate and run around doing epic Bluffs all day."

Of course, most people aren't me, least of all our hypothetical DM here; by Frank's suggestion, if we are to take it seriously, one might infer that the DM only has two choices, either 1) to have forseen the +600 Bluff bug and fixed it before allowing warlock, or 2) allowing this knowingly game-breaking bug for the rest of the session. The first case is not possible if you didn't see the bug coming, and in the second case the player can ask a passer-by to give him his horse, ride it to the palace, ask the guards to let him in and ask the King to hand over the kingdom. If there's time, he can hit up some outsiders for rulership of a few layers of Hell, too. Next session, his Diplomacy and Bluff bonuses drop back to +6, but one of the PCs now owns the multiverse.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Username17 »

Most people aren't game hackers, and find these problems gradually. For example, they might put up the bonus every morning, and then one time they might really need to negate someone's dex bonus (say, they were throwing a one-shot item at a will-o-wisp or something), so they spend a combat round casting it a second time to charge up.

People usually don't have a problem with that, and then someone notices "Hey, you could just charge up extra every morning", and then someone else notices "you could spend 10 minutes charging up a hundred times, this is absurd...." and so on.

Usually, when someone finds a game glitch, they stumble upon the tip of the ice berg first, and ice berg tips honestly don't look that bad. More people are going to attempt to use it twice (which if people are spending combat time on, is underpowered) than try to use it hundreds or thousands of times. However, the same logic that allows it to be used twice is going to allow it to be used thousands of times - so ultimately it's going to get nerfed into something else in every single campaign where this problem is noticed.

---

Now by discussing it on the web before hand, we can skip that entire step of self discovery and acrimony and go right to the part where you run a slightly altered wording that doesn't have that problem past your PCs. That is the whole point of discussing broken rules on the web - it lets us skip right to the demonstrative phase where the rules go berserk if left unattended, rather than having to get into a fight about what we should turn the rules into in a time-critical setting like a gaming table.

Any time you attempt to fix a broken rule, there is an infinite number of potential rules you could replace it with, of which a great many are still broken, and a great many will be essentially worthless. Doing that on the fly during gaming sessions is usually not effective, and has a very good chance of pissing people off. Imagine the joy of the warlock player if you decided to attempt a fix such as "You can only have one invocation active at one time"; or even worse, "non-instantaneous invocations require concentration". Can't you just imagine the joy? Either would fix that one problem, but I could seriously see the warlock player leaving in a huff over it - his entire invocation list would have instantly become the suck.

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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by RandomCasualty »

Jonathan_Drain wrote:
Were it my choice, I'd immediately step in and say "Look, you can't do that. If you can do that, you can get plus a zillion to Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate and run around doing epic Bluffs all day."

Of course, most people aren't me,


I'd really like to think that most people are you, at least in this scenario. I shudder to think that some DMs are willing to allow loopholes they know are broken simply because it's RAW. To me, part of DMing is putting your foot down when someone is going to utterly ruin the game, the rules be damned. If someone doesn't have the balls to say, "I am the law. I don't care what the book says, that doesn't work." then they shouldn't be sitting in a DM chair.

If any of those "Designer X is a moron" threads should have proven, it's that the designers make a ton of mistakes. Why anyone would follow them with blind faith is beyond me. Total internal consistency isn't a fair trade for a shitty game.

But the major rules abuses I don't really consider much of a threat, mainly because everyone can see they're insane. You don't have huge arguments whether the Word, the Wish or the hulking hurler is broken. Because you don't need to.

Fixing them is certainly another matter... but not all that difficult really. I generally don't have trouble fixing infinite loops mostly because I find the abuse tends to be rather obvious.


The real danger lies in stuff that isn't obviously broken, but is merely numerically overpowered. Because this stuff even the experienced DM may never see, and even when he finally does realize it, figuring out what you need to fix and how to fix it is very difficult.

I'm talking about stuff like 3.0 haste/harm/heal, polymorph effects, spikes, pounce, deadly charge, Quillblast, deathless frenzy, starmantle and so on.

These things are a heck of a lot more complicated. Because you don't immediately know its broken, or if it is, why. And fixing abilities like that is extremely tough. And it's where I think the web starts to break down as a DM aid tool, because people have trouble even agreeing there is an imbalance, let alone trying to find a way to fix it.

See, with polymoph or wild shape, nobody is going down to baator at level 10 and soloing Asmodeus. You don't see the game totally fall apart, but balance has certainly been disrupted. And these are the kinds of topics that are most important, the ones that could imbalance normal games, and the ones the casual DM may just not notice and let past. This is where rules discussions should be focused. Not on infintie loops and bag of rats tricks that no DM is going to let in his game anyway.


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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by User3 »

I believe it is standard in 3.5 that the same magical effects (even untyped ones) do not stack with themselves unless explicitly stated. That nixes the +600 Bluff.

Regarding innate abilities: I don't think class levels count. Innate abilities are racially based, as I see it, not from class levels.

The Savage Species racial progressions *do* give innate abilities, because the hit dice and abilities you gain there are part of your race. That's why you have to take them from first level and can't deviate until you've finished them. Simply put, regular classes are something you do, while the racial progressions are something you are.

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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Username17 »

greymuse wrote:I believe it is standard in 3.5 that the same magical effects (even untyped ones) do not stack with themselves unless explicitly stated.


You can believe whatever you want I suppose, but I actually quoted the relvent exception in this very thread, so unless you feel the need to find some counter example somewhere - your beliefs are wrong. You can jack your caster level up by one for every single successful Deathknell, with no limit, for example. People are usually pretty OK with that, since Death Knell is usually inherently limited in the number of times it can be used.

gm wrote:Regarding innate abilities: I don't think class levels count. Innate abilities are racially based, as I see it, not from class levels.


We've already established that what you think doesn't count because you are wrong.

The arguments presented as to how spell-likes from classes are somehow not "innate" come from completely worthless origins. Origins like:

Natural English: Natural spoken English has no bearing on D&D terminology. But if it did, this really wouldn't bolster your case at all. "Innate" is not the opposite of "learned", it's the opposite of "assisted".

Designer Intent: The designers already said they intended to allow Druids to use this feat on their birthday. So much so, that when they redesigned the Druid in 3.5, they went out on a limb and gave them the benefits of this feat for free.

In terms of rules arguments - you haven't got any. The game has designators for this sort of thing - "Inherited" abilities are things you are born with, "monstrous" feats are feats that require creature abilities. The feat does not have any of those designators and you don't have a leg to stand on.

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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Essence »

Also, please go back and read the flavor text from CA. It describes the warlocks' abilities as innate magical power, and it claims that warlocks are "born, not made". So any claims that you can't use ST on invocations is contradicted both by the RAW and by the very flavor text of the class.

All y'all who believe otherwise have no leg to stand on.
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Username17 »

I really don't like that line of reasoning, as it implies that we accept the idea that there is a difference between learned and innate - which we don't. But yes, if you accepted that idea, then it still would not mean that warlocks in particular were prevented from taking that ability.

But it's a dumb argument, because the designers openly accpeted the feat's use on specifically learned powers like Wildshape, and because the word "innate" does not mean that you didn't learn it - you just means that you aren't getting help to perform the relevent task.

Innate is used in conversational and technical English to differentiate from "computer assisted", or "electronically enhanced" and such, not to distinguish between "genetic talent" and "learned ability" - which is unsurprising because in real life we generally cannot distinguish between those two causes at all. If someone can sing well without electronic enhancement we say that they sing well "innately" - but they almost certainly have undergone a great deal of singing training. By the same token, anything that anyone can do without the aid of equipment is "innate" - which means that absolutely all of your class features are "innate" to you by definition.

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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Bigode »

Frank wrote:The whole idea of giving people "save points" is retarded. It either becomes completely metagamey and useless, or it becomes completely broketastic - and it has no middle ground. The best way to fix it is to defenestrate it.
So, in which category you'd put this?
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Captain_Bleach »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1102147117[/unixtime]]
There's no way to "fix" the Thought Bottle. It just can't be done. Sure, XP costs and level loss are bad for game balance, and the thought bottle gets rid of them, but it does so in the bad touch way - where you end up having to tearfully explain the experience to a social worker. The whole idea of giving people "save points" is retarded. It either becomes completely metagamey and useless, or it becomes completely broketastic - and it has no middle ground. The best way to fix it is to defenestrate it.


What book is this "Thought Bottle" in?
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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Neeek »

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1195352396[/unixtime]]

What book is this "Thought Bottle" in?


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Re: Break me a Warlock.

Post by Yahzi »

Jonathan_Drain wrote:When was the last time your human sorcerer had Swallow Whole, and what sense would it make for him to swallow a gnome?

I'm not gonna answer that question without my lawyer present.

:biggrin:
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