Races of War

[Draco_Argentum]

Yeah but even if Roxlim made a valid point it'd be a valid point.

Foil action is one of those abilities that makes you change your tactics. It also costs immeadiate actions, which fighters never really got to use. At first blush its hard core. I keep thinking of new ways to beat it though.

[fbmf]

Wait...Roxlimn is Archtyrant Terevoth?

Game On,
fbmf

[Draco_Argentum]

No, AT is Archtyrant. I was just using Roxlim as an example because he isn't involved, avoids ad hominem.

[RandomCasualty]

1154936705[/unixtime]][Insightful Strike [Combat]
You Hack people down with inherent awesomeness.
Benefits: You may use your Wisdom Modifier in place of your Strength Modifier for your melee attack rolls.
+1: Your attacks have The Edge against an opponent who has a lower Wisdom and Dexterity than your own Wisdom, regardless of relative BAB.

I don't understand this ability.

Do you mean wisdom and dex bonuses? Or wisdom and dex scores?

So you've got an oppone nt with Wis 12, Dex 14. and you've got 18 wisdom.

Is is
1) (12 + 14 = 30) < 18
2) (+1 + +2 = +3) < +4
3) 12 < 18 AND 14 < 18
4) +1 < +4 AND +2 < +4

[Username17]

It's 12 < 18 and 14 < 18.

I understand that the properties of mathematics are difficult to express in natural English, and thus there is ambiguity, but that really is the best way I have to express that.

In short, it's just like Weapon Finesse, but you use a "noncombat stat" in exchange for which your opponent can resist with that stat or their Dexterity, whichever is better for them.

-Username17

[Essence]

Isn't the Samurai's ability to turn a hit into an auto-confirmed critical massively unbalanced? It's OK if you're using a sword or a club, great if you're using an axe, and golden if you're using a scythe or mercurial greatsword.

[Shokatsuryou]

1155920417[/unixtime]]Isn't the Samurai's ability to turn a hit into an auto-confirmed critical massively unbalanced? It's OK if you're using a sword or a club, great if you're using an axe, and golden if you're using a scythe or mercurial greatsword.

Yes and no. I have been thinking about this issue for a while. For the most part, it's acutally not so bad to use high threat range weapons, since the majority of the Samurai's attacks are Attacks of Opportunity. You cannot use the Kiai! ability on AoOs.

For example, I made a 12th level Samurai character who had three regular attacks, but like twelve AoOs per round. If you have Weapon Finesse or Insightful Strike or something, you have the Edge pretty much all the time and can AoO whenever you want. In that case, pumping up threat range actually looks like a viable option.

However, once the Samurai hits level 19 it seems like you're right. All Samaurai are better off using high critical mulitplier weapons, since all AoOs from then on are confirmed crits too.

[DP]

Is it just me or is the +16 abilty for subtle cut really terrible?

[The_Matthew]

1155996866[/unixtime]]Is it just me or is the +16 abilty for subtle cut really terrible?

Well, that ability is save vs. Tekken Juggle so I don't think it's that terrible.

[User3]

Are you guys taking material?

If so, I wrote up a little something. Feel free to reject or use it as you see fit. You don't have to give me credit for it, either, I'd just like to see it get used if it's any good.

The thing to understand about humans is that although they're prey and tax fodder right now, eventually they're going to end up ruling the multiverse. This includes stamping out the Sahugin and planar menances. This is because they've traded tangible advantages for long-term ones. Here's what they got going for them:

1. It's no secret that, despite their racial simplicity, humans were the last creatures on earth to be created. Right now, no one's sure whether human attributes led to them being really successful at civilization and ascended more gods or whether human beings were the form the gods wanted all along. But regardless, there are more human gods than any other god. Partially because they breed really fast, but mainly because most human gods are not idiots. Unlike idiot gods like the dwarven and elven ones, they don't discriminate according to race. Kord and his priests will smile upon a gnoll as long as he gets lip service. Furthermore humans are also religiously intolerant. If you get conquered by a human race, you can expect to be forcefully converted. Not everyone stays converted, but every time humans are driven from their conquered lands by the displaced orc race, there are still a few orcs who will secretly believe in Pelor.

2. Humans cross-breed with other races like no other. No one can explain why human beings are so hot to other races, especially when there's things like nymphs and dryads around the corner. But regardless, alliances have been forged between other races just because humans have had babies with them. The effect might overall be really tiny; but there's a reason why the rare reasons warlike races like orcs will negotiate with human beings and not elves or dwarves, despite being cheated by them more.

3. Speaking of breeding, humans mature very fast. In any publication that gives optional races, humans are still one of the fastest races to reach adulthood. This means that they can beat you, if they have to, with sheer numbers. Unlike faster breeding races, like goblins, human society doesn't automatically explode if it gets too big. The planet cannot support even one billion kobolds, dwarves, or elves, but it can support 10 billion humans. Humans will win a racial war of attrition between the 'common' races. Not over a period of generations, like with most ones, but over centuries.

4. Human soldiers are the sex. Don't get me wrong; human peasants suck like crazy. They'll get their asses handed to them by halflings in straight-up combat. However, all they need to go through to be badasses from cannon fodder is a nice little speech from William Wallace. That's when they suddenly gain knowledge of how to use decent weapons, and importantly, a feat. A first level human with one month of military training can have power attack and cleave. They also gain an extra skill point. This means that this species that doesn't have basics like darkvision or illusions or even the ability to eat questionable food without getting ill will suddenly kick the crap out of you in large-scale battle if they're being led by someone competent. Elven archers win archery contests, but human archers win archery battles. Because they can get point blank shot and rapid shot. If this wasn't cool enough, they get an extra skill point. This means that their trained personnel are better than you, too. In addition to having soldier basics like ride and survival, they can have a little extra skill on the side. Like sapping. Or how to be a sweet engineer.

5. Human societies get completely transferable abilities, due to the skill point and the feat. Even though they're badasses in combat, after the elves form a tight strangehold on their lands none of their abilities really do much for the advancement of civilization. None of their abilities helps them build cities or design new weapons or craft tools and they even make crappy farmers to boot. So after the race of barbarians comes through and conquers you and forms an alliance with the farmer village, in a couple of generations they'll have children that have feats that will make their society stronger. Humans lead long-term peace and war arrangements because they can have kids that have abilities to do what they need.

Depending on how long human beings have been around they might have already conquered a large part of the surface world. Fortunately for the other races, humans love to have sex with exotic species and are much more tolerant than anyone else. Hell, there are halfling and halforc mayors in some places. The only reasons why halflings aren't a marginalized loser race like sea elves or derro is because humans won't mind if you live in their village and eat up their resources as long as you go to church with them and let them sex you up. This never happens in any other community. And if you don't go blitzkrieg on one of their societies, they'll dig in and slowly strangle you out over a course of 100 years.


Triumph of the Humans: Racial Assimilation

Human beings are a racial and cultural virus. They'll absorb your language, screw your women, steal your ideas, and put their gods before yours. For a lot of conquered societies, their true death doesn't come in war, it comes in peace. After some strange human married the sahugin prince and convinced him to do things during pillow talk, it was all over. The next thing you know, there's human beings (and the baggage train of halflings and half elves they tend to bring with them) in the capital city chilling with their cool underwater breathing herbs, the formula of which they stole from tritons. Also the statue of the Great Mother has been replaced with Pelor.

Unfortunately, this has a dark side to it. There are some races human beings can't ever hope to absorb. No matter how much you train and try to raise a mindflayer right, they're still going to eat brains. This is not good for any society and the kings won't stand for that. It's likely that these races will be killed in the world wars, but it's more likely that unsuitable races like derro get marched off to camps in cages and killed there. When human beings completely conquer a country, every race that doesn't want to live in their cities and resists brotherhood, religious conversation, and sexual intercourse ends up dead. The reason why it's safe to live in the Highlands and not in Mordor is because human beings genocided all of the salamanders and ettins a long time ago.

This makes the truly 'evil' races nervous. They know they don't have a place in this frightening new world and their only chance is to form a perverse alliance of kuo-toa, beholders, aboleth, and so-on. Maybe even demons, too. Those multiplanar metropolises are getting a little too powerful.

Defeat of the Humans: You're going down with us

Take a look at any book that has multiple races in it. Chances are most of the heroes in it are humans. This is a natural extension of their advantages, as humans have a society and racial makeup that supports diverse adventurers. But it's no secret that heroes are the key to winning any war. The dwarves and elves and gnomes, while contemptuous of humans for their cultural imperialism, ironically need them to preserve their own cultures. Elves, which take like 80 years to make a goddamn sorceror have no chance of keeping up with a race that takes 14 years to make one and will do everything in their power to make sure that lucky child develops to the best of their ability.

Suddenly all of the humans die. It might be from extended warfare, but if it's just humans, it's more likely that it was some kind of out-of-control disease or extended natural disaster. Suddenly the 'higher' races supply of cannon fodder, innovation, and badasses dry up. What are they going to do? Are they going to abandon their culture and take up the path of the human? What they did worked so well for such a puny race--at the cost of having no cultural history. For races like dwarves, they'd rather die than have their species undergo this fate.

[User3]

Oh, and here's the flavor text blurb that goes to the beginning of your document.


Basically, when the great creator was designing humans, the saw the successes and failures of other races and decided to build a viral race that would piggyback onto everyone else. Here were the design processes into making human beings.


1. You had to have a race that bred a fast as possible that didn't self-destruct (like goblins) and had some sort of feature built into them to get rid of the failed models of its kind. This was done by making an internally peaceful, short-lived race. Furthermore, while a short life span was desirable, because it demoralized communities less when they went to war and encouraged cultural evolution, it couldn't be so short such that their heroes died before doing anything cool. The human lifespan for some reason fit into this model.

2. You had to have a race that was capable of knocking up other creatures. Humans can breed with elves and orcs, but elves can't breed with orcs. Why? Who knows. But the point is that humans have a way of permanently stamping their species onto other societies.

3. You had to have a race that was good at all aspects of heroing while still making good cannon fodder. The human bonus feat and skill point fill this build nicely. Once human beings that are trained in mounted combat take over, they can have kids that make badass civil engineers.

So that's what happened. It worked really good, too, because despite being late players to the game they're really good and actually have a chance at taking over the world.

[fbmf]

You don't have to give me credit for it, either

That's convenient because you didn't sign your name.

Game On,
fbmf

[User3]

That was me. Whoops.

Whatever.

[Fwib]

heh. Cool, reminds me of something that my GM always declares to be Truth:

Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.

[erik]

Are a couple things still relevant in the humans superior due to feats comments?

i.e. Point Blank Shot etc and Power Attack etc are referenced but not really around any more I thought.

[User3]

Yeah they are. I wrote this a looooong time ago for another project. I sort of threw up the campaign scenarios at the last minute and split up the main description to make it look like humans are a 'monster' character.

So if there are mechanical mistakes, I shall fix them. Thanks, clikml.

[Digestor]

Soooo.... we're basically mass-marauding rapists? I like it!

[User3]

From the text for Sniper:

"Benefits: Your range increments are 50% longer than they would ordinarily be. Any benefit of being within 30' of an opponent is retained out to 60'."

So, does this mean that a 9th-level Fighter with the Sniper feat can interrupt at 60'? And if not, why?

[Essence]

Yes and no. I have been thinking about this issue for a while. For the most part, it's acutally not so bad to use high threat range weapons, since the majority of the Samurai's attacks are Attacks of Opportunity. You cannot use the Kiai! ability on AoOs.

Irrelevant. While it's kinda nice to get more crits, it's mathematically provable that a high crit multiplier and an equally high threat range equal out in the long run in terms of damage dealt -- it's just that with a high multiplier, you'll kill something very dead every once in a while, rather than getting relatively minor boosts to damage fairly regularly.

Kiai totally throws off that math, making the very deadness happen on command rather than using the threat range's odds. That's ungood.

[Crissa]

Yeah, but at that level, aren't you choosing Kiai for your very deadness instead of defenses against becoming very dead?

Think what the spellslingers will be throwing or what the pure Fighter in this could do at the same level.

-Crissa

[Essence]

Irrelevant. The comparison in question is not between the Fighter and the Samurai, but between the Samurai who is using the classic Katana (x2 multiplier) and the Samurai who is using the provably superior Scythe (x4).

The ability should be modified in some way to make the two weapons equal in the long run, or else you're going to see all kinds of Samurai running around with picks and scythes and little to no supporting flavor text.

[Crissa]

Or you could have flavour text and exotic weapons which supports it.

-Crissa

[User3]

Zen Archery increases the crtical multiplier for its autothreat effect by one for X-bows (effect: all normal bows work at x3).

No reason you couldn't adapt this to the Samurai's Kiai as well, although the bastard sword would still be at x3, keeping the scythe the power choice. Or, rather, whatever 1-handed x4 pick you can find. The only reason to use a bastard sword is getting 1d10 with your longsword instead of 1d8, so there isn't much reason to use it anyway.
I'm happy ignoring the bastard sword = katana flavor text, and sticking with the closest weapon as far as appearance goes (scimitar, which would go from 18x2 to x4).

[Username17]

While it's kinda nice to get more crits, it's mathematically provable that a high crit multiplier and an equally high threat range equal out in the long run in terms of damage dealt -- it's just that with a high multiplier, you'll kill something very dead every once in a while, rather than getting relatively minor boosts to damage fairly regularly.

I agree. The Kiai! wording is sloppy, I'll get to it once I've figured out what's still edible in my fridge.

While auto-matic criticals already exist in the game (in the form of coup de grace, for example) they are normally rare enough that the fact that you get them doesn't end up offsetting the fact that you get wasted damage from very large crits sometimes in most cases (what a great sentence). But you are correct that the Samurai's ability, like the Vorpal "auto-kill on a natural 20" actually does throw off the math and should be rewritten.

-Username17

[Iaimeki]

A couple of other notes from my recent experience building a samurai:

Or, rather, whatever 1-handed x4 pick you can find.

- Why use a one-handed weapon? Samurai don't have shield proficiency, and as far as I can tell in RoW rules, there isn't any way to get shield proficiency except by dipping a class that gives it; and the rules on ACP are splintery enough so you don't want to use a shield without having proficiency, in most cases. I imagine most samurai end up wielding two-handed weapons, because you want the 1.5x multiplier on Str since you need non-dice sources of damage to multiply with your massive criticals. (Unless you're referring to CW's exotic weapon master for 2x Str bonus to damage? Which goes back to the problem of knowing how, or even if, RoW material combines with WotC material given that the feats are completely different.)

- Changes to kiai! need to work correctly with Insightful Strike, which can make the phrasing involved a little annoying.

- The actual best weapon for a samurai at the moment is the totally ridiculous 1d12 (for a Medium character) 19-20/x4 greathammer from the MM4. It's an exotic weapon, but in RoW once you lug one around for a level you're proficient. With Insightful Strike, it becomes a 17-20/x7 weapon once you have +11 BAB, I think; if you modify kiai! to work like Zen Archery, you're looking at a x10 or a x25 weapon. (One hopes errata will be forthcoming, but one never knows with Wizards.)

- Don't forget the oathbow, since you can use it to get a x4 critical multiplier.

- How does keen stack with Zen Archery? If you have a keen longbow with a 19-20/x3 threat range, does it become x4 or a x5 weapon? What about a keen oathbow?

- The other reason PCs generally want weapons with large threat ranges and low multipliers is that randomness works against them.