It's been long enough now that we've all calmed down. Was this book really as bad as people say? I quite liked it and thought it was a great glimpse of what could have been with 4e if they hadn't changed direction.
I have mixed feeling about it. I think it was fun to play with mechanically but caused all the balance fags to get really up in arms about the state of game balance. Which in turn made the game worse because at the end of the day class balance doesn't help at all if your table isn't filled with mentally stunted children. The price paid for balance was a loss of a lot of flavor and class feeling. You'll never have these neat prestige classes with cool but niche or strange ability sets again (well with homebrew you will)
>>94499625The zubsystem and ideas are fine. I probably would dislike it if it was the system's default way of handling weapon users, but aince it's its own thing with its own set of classes that can interop with the other classes I'm more than fine with it.You can have a fighter pick up 3 maneuvers and a stance via feats and it'll feel quite different from obe that didn't for example.That said, the book is broken as hell as in it's badly written. Probably the worse written book from the 3.5e era.Hell, even the errata was fucked.
>>94499778>worst written book of 3.5 eralots of competition for that, I'd say probably Tome of Magic was the worst written book.
>>94499625It's great. It gives martial classes a lot more flexibility and the option to perform some cool maneuvers while still making them feel distinct from conventional casters. Using your attack roll to counter enemy attacks (including being able to deflect an enemy archer's arrow or a wizard's ray of disintegration), using pure grit to shake off negative conditions or cutting through a set of manacles with a single blow are all cool things that it makes sense a martial hero should be able to do. I do think they could've drawn a clearer line between the mundane and the supernatural disciplines though.
Project Orcus was an "incubator" project that may have been intended for the board-game insistence of Hasbro rather than part of the panicked ass-covering against such 4e was, given the Crusader's random access came from collectable card packs. Not sure how "random access rules" like that would have gone for a TTRPG, but it could certainly help with the spell bloat by removing it from standard books and giving a thoroughly comparable design-by-landfill to non-casters and MtG was still decent.The "Weeabu Fightan Magic" criticism is a well-substantiated thematic dissonance foiled by the existence of the Monk in the core rulebooks and a wide variety of similarly-stupid (Ex) feat and Prestige Class functions, with the irony that Desert Wind is fully compliant with (Ex) Ki precedent given PHB2's fucking Force effect. The half-IL is a genius solution to letting a subsystem into the relentless dipfest of Martial character building. The editing could use like five more erratas instead of the half of one before a copy of Tome of Magic's.
>>94499655I liked the jade phoenix mage prestige class from tome of battle.
everything is great but crusaderrandom access maneuvers just feel wrong to me
>>94499625>It's been long enough now that we've all calmed down.No we haven't. BOOK OF WEEABOO FIGHTAN' MAGIC HURR DE DURR SHIT BOOK!actually, yeah it's an interesting piece of history at this point, as you say. The problem is that it's a set of new stuff tacked on to an already full system, but honestly I liked the various late-3rd books that experimented with class design and mechanics heavily. I like Bo9S and I liked tome of magic and magic of incarnum, they were all at least interesting even if they didn't work great.
>everyone is a caster nowReally, that wasn't such a bad idea
>>94499625The weirdest part of all of this is that one of the main cries of people deriding it was "Realism", but this book does a much better job simulating real world weapon combat.Sure, there a ton of clearly supernatural powers and the names are anime as fuck, but actual HEMA fencing has a back-and-forth of various attacks, blocks, feints, and adjustments to get back into stance that D&D's standard "Mindlessly attack every turn" doesn't simulate. In fact, Standard martials are way less realistic than this book.
>>94500238It's still mostly pegged to normal combat functions, just with a mostly-oriental High-Flying Bullshit layer to outputs.>>94500268I will once again shill Heron-Marked:>https://minmaxforum.com/index.php?board=245.0
>>94499625ToB is still my favorite splatbook of any system to this day.
I've never heard anything bad said about this book, though?>>94499828The fact that the two tome books were both written so sloppily that it would put half of 3.0 to shame isn't really a defense of ToB's writing
>>94499848Hard agree. I feel that 5e's concentration mechanic would be a natural fit for stances (with unique effects like granting cover to nearby allies), since it's a resource that martials basically can't use as is. Hell, rage could have been a stance in this fashion, since it already prevents you from concentrating on spells.The idea of maneuvers that let you do unique things also tickles me. I'd just like there to be some category of tasks that spellcasters aren't better at, and that's more broadly applicable than grappling inside of an antimagic field.
>>94499625No, it just made fightards rage because it offered better martials but you need to be able to actually read the book to play them.
>>94499625>Was this book really as bad as people say?It's been said a million times and several more in this thread, I'm sure, but the problem was that it came so late in 3.5's lifespan that people were already too used to their own retarded interpretation of 3.5's sense of "balance" to accept a set of replacement classes and unique mechanics that drastically overshadowed nearly everything that came before it, and all without any of the usual feat tax or spastic attempts at loopholing and exploiting the existing rules.
>>94501616I feel like, if Tome of Battle had come out together with Complete Warrior (and if Complete Warrior had gotten a "sequel book" like Completes Arcane, Divine and Adventurer had), it would've been much more warmly received. It would've gotten more support over the following couple of years with new feats, maneuvers and prestige classes instead of basically being the last new content to ever get released in a gameline where taking a base class to 20 was usually the worst decision you could make for a character.Nothing was ever going to save Tome of Magic from Binder being the only good part of it, though.
>>94501071>I've never heard anything bad said about this book, though?Just wait, they'll find the thread soon enough.
>>94501071It does pretty high amount of damage that outclasses evoker wizards over the course of any given adventure. Of course, anyone who knows basic strategy knows that attack spells are often a waste of slots and pale in comparison to the plethora of save-or-suck spells.There is the whole Iron Heart Surge thing which allows for hilarious bullshit due to its poor wording but even with a reasonable interpretation it is still a very powerful ability.
>>94502561IHS and WRT are arguably T2 material.>There is the whole Iron Heart Surge thing which allows for hilarious bullshit due to its poor wordingA lot of that was reddit physicsfag shit that doesn't actually work because they were trying to use it on things that do not work the way they arbitrarily declared they do.
>>94499625It was found years ago the best way to sort out 3e's balance problems was to just ban core spells and classes and allow this and complete psionic.Or was it expanded psionic?
>>94502588>that doesn't actually workIHS is an issue because "condition" isn't a term ever clearly defined in the rules. There are lots of things that most people would agree it covers, but it isn't actually hard to imagine non-trivial scenarios in which people might disagree over whether, say, being grappled is a condition. The ridiculous meme cases of spontaneously aborting your own pregnancy to benefit from the morale bonus are memes, yes, but it's absolutely a poorly-worded maneuver.
>>94502620The meme cases I'm talking about are e.g. extinguishing the sun, which isn't a thing you can do because that's not really how light works in RAW.>it isn't actually hard to imagine non-trivial scenarios in which people might disagree over whether, say, being grappled is a conditionIt is, because grappling is a condition in the list of conditions on page 300 of the DMG. Anyone who disagrees is trolling or illiterate. The only ambiguity is if that's the kind of condition that IHS means, but given that the spellcasting rules (PHB) explicitly refer to those conditions and Crusader in ToB does earlier in the same book, it probably means those conditions.The open ended part is "effect", which is very general and covers most abilities and item effects in the game.
>>94501616It's not "nearly everything" being "drastically overshadowed", especially when you discount the large volume of hardly-ever-used page-padding. Due to it not interfacing well with that large body of preceding content on account of most Strikes being strictly Standard Actions, it lags behind the well-built dipstacks, ending up in a high-floor low-cieling place where there's at least a dozen ways for a Fighter to do better numbers than them. Even if most of them revolve around Power Attack and a Barbarian dip...>>94502597Expanded Psionics Handbook, or XPH for short, is the "core" System Reference Document on Psionics. Complete Psionics has a few neat things including the routinely argued to this day aberrant wording of Ardent, but also applies quite a few nerf-bats because the writers didn't like how people were using XPH.
>>94502620Forgive my Swiss cheese memory, it's been over a decade since the last time I actually read D&D rules.
>>94502729Meant for >>94502681, and serving as further proof that my senility advances unabated.
>>94499625This book did more to fix the linear fighter/exponential wizard problem than anything else.
>>94502729>>94502737I'd like to be clear that "condition" (or rather, "Conditions") is used fucking everywhere (skill checks, environmental factors, etc.) as natural language and does NOT mean the same thing as "Conditions" as in "the Conditions in the Condition Summary", so you could argue that IHS targets such a vague and general natural language term, but in either case grappling qualifies.
>>94503242It does say "with a duration of 1 or more rounds", I interpret that to mean "Assuming a solitary spherical cow in a vacuum, I can tell exactly when it will end", if it can't be expressed numerically it can't be surged.
>>94502597Banning classes isn't necessary you just need to prune the spell list (which is a lot of work). I don't let druid take animal companion or wildshape though
>>94503675there's nothing wrong with letting a druid take wildshape, it's an iconic abilitywhat you need to do is ban natural spell instead
>>94500268in theory that's what AC is supposed to simulate, it's supposed to be a combination of "anything" that can let you avoid being hit and attack rolls are meant to also be an abstraction in practice this concept has been lost long ago and no longer makes mechanical sense
>>94504197>no longer makes mechanical senseIt didn't really make sense in the first place.Hitpoints is also supposed to take that role, being an abstraction of the skills the character developes to take less damage from fights, but that thinking completely falls apart from the first release of original D&D when said characters also required more healing to restore those hitpoints. The only thing that actually makes sense with the mechanic is the character having more "Meat"AC also only really makes sense as armor deflection. Miss-chance is a separate mechanic entirely, damage absorption is a separate mechanic entirely, Parrying has its own mechanics, there's even another mechanic for damage division(half or x% damage from Y source), so armor deflection(and the slight movements used to help things deflect) is the only thing left AC can be. That in turn means that the majority of melee fighters in 3e stand in one spot waling on each other with minimal movement, dodging, or tactics.Melee classes in 3e are hard-carried by the setting's inherent in-universe(Thanks Vecna) leveling mechanics, because they'd get fucking Destroyed in historical earth.
>>94504322>Thanks VecnaCan anyone translate this?
>>94504561I have no idea what that schizo was on about. AC and HP aren't perfect but make enough sense to work for a fantasy RPG game.
>>945045613e is canonically the result of vecna changing multiversal metaphysics when he briefly took over sigil. Planescape being the setting that connects all settings was the writer's excuse for why the change affected all settings(technically including the ones that didn't get official 3e ports). I have no idea what this has to do with hp or ac though, those were in every edition. Even THAC0 means "to hit Armor Class 0".
>>94504769>AC and HP aren't perfect but make enough sense to work for a fantasy RPG game.The complaint isn't that they don't work.The complaint is that they can't stand for what the rules pretend they do.HP jumps between level straight up don't work as an abstraction for gaining more skill, what they do work for is an abstraction for a person becoming more durable until they become like superman compared to a human.AC doesn't really work as an armor calculation, that's why so many d20 medieval/mudcore fantasy games remove it from armor entirely and replace it with damage reduction. D20 game of thrones is a prime example. What it does work great as is a deflection calc.
>>94499778>That said, the book is broken as hell as in it's badly written. Probably the worse written book from the 3.5e era.Nah, the other 3 system experiment books from that period are worse. Tome of Magic, Weapons of Legacy and Magic of Incarnum have much worse issues than ToB.
>>94501071>I've never heard anything bad said about this book, though?With the Tome of Magic, it was easier to focus on the issues of the individual classes in the book (Truenamer actively gets weaker as it goes up in level) rather than complain about the book in general. ToB triggered conceptual opposition from those in opposition to anything "Anime."
>>94499625There are parts of it that can certainly be repurposed. The whole "lore" of 9 swords is dumb but then it was never meant to be a mainstay in the game mechanics much like incarnum.There are definitely ideas that can be used to make fighting styles and martial options more interesting but we can't make martials too complicated now least the sub 30 iq types who can play wizards be confused and overwhelmed by the dazzling array of options.
>>94499625It's pretty great, opened the door for a staggeringly huge body of homebrew, and made non casters more fun and viable to play.
>>94501566No, it made the Batfags seethe because they think every non-caster should be Batman, and it made casterfags seethe because it helped close the gap.
>>94503675Ban all summon spells. That's 90% of the problem taken care of.
>>94505607Genuinely can't tell if fake-grog fighterfags are bots or just retards
>>94499625ToB is hands-down the best 3.X splat ever IMO. It's really hard to under-sell how dramatically it improves things on both sides of the table; Warblade makes Bob the Fighting Man enjoyable and productive throughout the entire campaign and as a DM it gives you a lot more cushion in planning because the party's melee combatants aren't based on cheese or gimmicks and effectively obviates the need to buff martial classes if you're stuck doing balancing. Just slap down the usual suspects (summons, wild shape, diplomancy, etc.) and that's about all you'll need out of the gate.Also works great for low-magic campaigns. A Swordsage being able to *teleports behind u* or throw around fire or a Warblade being really good at things like jumping or smashing walls can have a lot of mileage in campaigns where those things are less accessible than usual.
>>94505838It's good, but I like the ToB prototype, AKA Psychic Warrior, better.
>>94505903Psychic warrior is cool but is clearly a psionic power source not martial. There's martial there but it's more like a mix of martial abilities and psionics.
>>94505909It's still internal power, not external like magic, so I'm fine with it. Also I prefer a crunchier style of play, managing power points rather than per encounter maneuvers.
>>94499625It was the 3.5e version of 4e ... so slightly better.
It should have come with a set of decks and additional sets to buy.Making classes with deck mechanics was/is a great idea, needing to print the decks yourself not so much.
>>94501998The Shadowcaster just needs to have many of its restrictions loosened and it'll be serviceable. The Truenamer does need a complete makeover though.
>>94499625Something people seem to forget is that 3.5 is usually played at lowish levels. All the armchair players will talk about garbage like pun pun but in actual practice most games get to maybe 5th level if you’re lucky. At early levels most casters are mediocre at best. At 1st level fighters are dominant in combat and then warblades as fighters plus maneuvers and stances are even better to the point of absurdity. As time goes on they fall off less than fighters and casters still reign supreme. But many people thought ToB was unbalanced because of how overwhelming they are at early levels and frankly if your campaign doesn’t get higher than 5th level or so they have a point.
>>94506656>if your campaign doesn’t get higher than 5th level or so they have a point.They still don't even in this case. Simply put, they were whining about the entire game needing to change to fit their personal campaign. Entitled shits like that don't have a point, Ever.
>>94506656You've never played the game>punpun>not online at 5th levelYou've never read about it either
>>94506735I've played and DMed many 3.5 campaigns but not for a while. My favorite campaign was run using Iron Heroes which is a highly modified 3.5No competent DM allows Punpun, which was my point. It's an armchair player who even thinks having infinite stats would ever be allowed at a table. It would obviously ruin the fun of the game for everyone and either the game would die or the DM would tell you quite rightly to go fuck yourself.
>>94506767>punpun is a serious build that was intended to be playedYou have brain damage, nogames
>>94506770I said it was the opposite? Are you retarded
>>94506779Anon, you are arguing with a bot.Figuratively or literally, it doesn't really matter.
>>94505216They do?Can you provide a couple of examples, pleas3?I love MoI.
>>94506801Tome of magic has the truenamer (which just doesn't work) and the shadowcaster which is a neat class but absolutely crippled by having worse spells than a wizard with almost no casts per day and an extremely narrow selection of spells. It also requires high int to learn your spells and high cha for your save dcs. at level 3 you will have 3 cantrips each which can be cast 3 times per day and two level one, one level two spell each with a single cast per day. (9 cantrip + 3 spell casts overall) and these are all much weaker than an equivalent spell while running off int/cha stats. To add to this to get some of the "better" choices you have to use your limited spell selection on bad choices as they have to be taken in order. Oh and at best you'll get your first spell able to deal lethal damage at level 5 (1 cast per day) so level 1-4 you only have access to garbage amounts of nonlethal damage (2d4 single target ray 3x a day or 1d6cl touch). Its crowd control isn't much better.
>>94506866the 1d6 up to 5d6 nonlethal is once a day until 7th level. I feel like a wizard but weaker isn't such a bad thing, but this class is has just so few casts a day, and you generally feel like a useless party member against most enemy types and God forbid if you hit multiple encounters before a rest. The rigid spell progress hurts it a lot. Overall it is a 4/10 class with someone annoyingly written rules and features that are best ignored. The attached picture is an example of how poorly written even a basic class feature is.
>>94503675Shifting them into spells so they hold opportunity cost could work. It's how Animal Companions worked in 3.0, using a HD cap like Animate Dead, which is why Rangers got a penalty despite being the source.>>94504322Miss-chance, damage absorption, and parrying didn't have their own mechanics in Original D&D when AC was settled on. Hit Points are as the name implies points for the hits you take, they've always been a weird mix of narrativium dodging death and meat points because they've always been a bit big for environmental threats and not prevented effects that require the blow to actually cause injury like venomous bites.>>94505012The HP gain with level works for the narrativium dodging death side and complicated stamina management for avoiding injury, the problem is that it's the same bucket for pure-meat threats like falling from a great height. It's the same breakdown as the Trollblooded Half-Zombie, the gameplay abstraction just didn't get fine enough to separate some important verisimilitude things. There's a UA variant for this for a reason.>>94506801NTA, but on the MoI front it's got two big skill floor issues with Essentia management being a bit TOO unique and the Chakra Bind/Magic Item conflict making for a lot of shuffling to get the normal numeric values working. The latter's not nearly as much a problem with Magic Item Compendium in play as you can use the Common Magic Item Effects on the lenses, but the routine fiddliness of Essentia management still remains.For Weapons of Legacy, the penalties are generally worse than the benefits as they're intentionally going after your character's primary functionality, and the Rituals mean they still eat quite a bit of your WBL for a difficult-to-modify item. It can be optimized around with a custom one, but isn't nearly so clear-cut a value proposition as it should be.
>>94499625If I'm dealing with a DM who is more of a stickler for RAW and I want to make a martial character, I go for the ToB classes. I am bothered by the fact that all the Martial Maneuvers are only for melee attacks even if it's only in the description. A DM with a little creativity can lift that requirement for maneuvers that don't explicitly require the moves be melee according to its effects (I can understand Setting Sun needing to be melee only by and large), but if you want to do +1d6 Fire Damage, I don't see why that can't explicitly be melee only. When I run games, I loosen the requirements.
>>94505254>There are parts of it that can certainly be repurposed. The whole "lore" of 9 swords is dumb but then it was never meant to be a mainstay in the game mechanics much like incarnum.Incarnum lore is dumber for shilling its iconics so hard and having a special metal that doesn't actually do anything (I'm guessing that it used to let you invest essentia in items to grant them an enhancement bonus, but it got dropped in editing). Both it and ToM also tie into the D&D "metaplot" by referencing the events of Bastion of Broken Souls. By comparison ToB just amounts to "there was once a famous martial arts guy who studied a lot of fighting styles and categorised them into nine types, then he died and his school is no longer around".Incarnum also suffered from being not one mechanic but three with heavy interaction (investing essentia, shaping soulmelds, and chakra binds), with presentation that made it hard for a lot of players to wrap their heads around everything.
>>94507774There's a ton of homebrew disciplines around focused on ranged combat, at least. It's a pretty easy framework to build on.Note also that Warblade isn't proficient with ranged martial weapons, only melee ones. Not as thrilling to shoot people from a distance, I guess.
>>94506866The writer of Shadowcaster had a suggested fix which I think went something like>Bonus mysteries per day for a high ability score>Existing mechanics for paths and bonus feats are thrown out and reworked. You can learn whatever mysteries you want, but you get a bonus feat each time you complete a path.>When mysteries become (Su) abilities, their save DC explicitly changes to use the standard formula for Su abilities (i.e. half your character level in place of spell level).
>>94506954>There's a UA variant for this for a reason.Wound and Vitality Points is okay, but it makes crits way too lethal - they should do added Con damage equal to their multiplier or something, not just turn the whole attack into Con damage.
>>94507824>and having a special metal that doesn't actually do anything (I'm guessing that it used to let you invest essentia in items to grant them an enhancement bonus, but it got dropped in editing)Are you referring to Pentifex? Because that could easily be backwards, given they're the subsystem's obligatory glowies to suppress in-system assholes.>Incarnum also suffered from being not one mechanic but three with heavy interaction (investing essentia, shaping soulmelds, and chakra binds)No more than spellcasting is a pile of different mechanics in a trenchcoat due to internal variance and ancillary mechanics using parts of it independently.
>>94507862That's true, but fortunately that's an easy fix to make, too. I also have made my own specifically focusing on ranged combat, but I haven't done any playtesting on it.
>>94507824I think they could have leaned more into the "if you don't have an essentia pool then instead of essentia damage you take Wis damage" clause that shows up in a few places.Make one of the basic mechanics of essentia "Whenever you'd take ability damage, you can choose to take some or all of it as essentia damage instead". That way it has a use even if you lack any receptacles, and you're interacting more with the rest of the system without needing enemies to have specific anti-incarnum powers.
My only contention with this is that in practice, the more buttons you add to someone's character sheet, the less creative they become in their problem solving and especially in combat.
>>94508209I agree. Thank you for agreeing with me on this in return. It's also why I'm not fond of 4E.
>>94508209Least creative players I've ever seen flocked to Fighter.
>>94508255Yeah, that's my experience as well. Usually the sort of people that won't even think of packing backup weapon or keeping some thrown/ranged option.
>>94508209Personally, I don’t think it’s linear. There’s absolutely such a thing as too many buttons, but there’s also such a thing as too few. Sure, when you get to the point of having too many obstacle-bypassing buttons, people will just assume any obstacle they don’t have a button for is impassable, but some nonzero number of obstacle-engaging buttons can lead to players interacting with the environment more creatively.
>>94506954>For Weapons of Legacy, the penalties are generally worse than the benefits as they're intentionally going after your character's primary functionality, and the Rituals mean they still eat quite a bit of your WBL for a difficult-to-modify item. It can be optimized around with a custom one, but isn't nearly so clear-cut a value proposition as it should be.Exactly. WoLs permanently penalize character's primary functionality in exchange for a few spell like abilities and a slight discount on a magical item. Fore example the Legacy Holy Avenger costs 55.5k gp to fully unlock and applies a -2 Attack penalty -3 Save penalty and decreases Max HP by 16 in exchange for Break Enchantment (CL 10) once per day and Heal (CL 15 self only) once per day compared to a non-Legacy Holy Avenger that costs 60.5k gp+ 4,800 xp to craft.
>>94509110By comparison, for NPCs they're +1 CR per ability tier and have neither penalties nor a GP/XP cost.
>>94509110Weapons of Legacy is badly written in generalFirst there's the Rube Goldberg writing of>Performing a legacy ritual doesn't give you new abilities, if gives you a feat which gives you new abilities, without counting against your feat slots. Also you can't take these feats in feat slots anyway, only through the ritual, and they don't count as feats for any purpose. Definitely not as legacy feats, which are a different thing.and then there's>Once you have performed a Least ritual you can select a Menu A ability at each level. Then at 6th level you can trade two Menu A abilities for a Menu B ability. Then at 7th level you can trade three Menu A abilities for a Menu C ability...when they could have just called them "Least abilities" and given the number of slots they take up as a number in brackets after the name
>>94509110When I used WoL in a campaign (over 10 years ago) I just removed the penalties. You have to do a bunch of shit to power up your items anyways so it seems only fair not to give harsh penalties.The fun part of them is that they grow with the wielder. That's a cool idea, the problem was in the implementation.
>>94508209I think that was 4e's biggest downfall. They gave everyone a ton of powers and utility abilities but doing anything outside of them barely ever happened and it discouraged winging it. That sort of thing is fine for a video game or board game but doesn't play to the strengths of ttrpgs. I don't understand why there wasn't a 4e video game, it would have been a hell of a lot better than trying to shoehorn 5e into one.
>>94509751WotC and Atari were busy having a lawsuit slapfight over video game licensing.
>>94509110>Legacy Holy AvengerIt actually takes under-tiered Enhancement so it outright wastes menu options.>>94509485>First there's the Rube Goldberg writing ofIt avoids adding another heading to the character booklet to track it. Terribly unfortunate for text elegance, but given the abominations spawned by trying to account for all the random bullshit responsible for the sheet becoming a booklet it's much appreciated.>when they could have just called them "Least abilities" and given the number of slots they take up as a number in brackets after the nameI actually have a partially-finished attempt at such that if I ever get around to finishing is intended to go over the existing ones to identify inefficient expenditures to squeeze more power out of what's notionally the same budget.>>94509751>I don't understand why there wasn't a 4e video gameThe one guy working on it suffered a mind-break that led to murder-suicide.
>>94509817>The one guy working on it suffered a mind-break that led to murder-suicide.This is not true. He was working on the VTT that was being marketed in the back of the first 3 or 4 4e books. It was tied to WotC's shitty Facebook rip off, Gleemax, that not even paid shills wanted to use. Gleemax being shuttered was likely the final push for him to commit murder suicide and then his spaghetti code nightmare wasn't worth the money to untangle to get the VTT running with D&D Insider so it was completely scrapped. As said farther up thread the lack of 4e related video games was a rights issue squabble that wasn't resolved until 4e was already out of print. And also due to the more restrictive license making indie games using its systems more of a pain than it was worth when the 3e and then 5e licenses were right there for free.
>>94507904yeah, they help a lot! It's still not a good class by any stretch with these fixes but it does elevate some of the pain.
>>94509817>I actually have a partially-finished attempt at such that if I ever get around to finishing is intended to go over the existing ones to identify inefficient expenditures to squeeze more power out of what's notionally the same budget.When I tried this I had four power tiers covering all 20 levels, and added a descriptor system [Armor], [Weapon], etc.One new descriptor was [Investiture], which improves one of your existing abilities but turns it into an item-based one. E.g. there's a Least power which lets you use the item in place of your spellbook and material/focus components, but you must invest your spellcasting ability. If you take it then you're not actually a spellcaster, but a regular guy who bonded with an item that casts spells.Likewise if you're a Berserk fan then one power grants you Extra Rage by investing your rage ability in your armor.Or play a monster and take the Humanoid Form power which invests your race, which makes the humanoid appearance your true form and your monster body a transformation granted by the item.
>>94499625>Was this book really as bad as people say? Yes. It infected the line for over a decade and still has retards defending it. It was the most damaging book ever published under DnD.
Since people brought up Magic of Incarnum and Tome of magic in addition to Tome of Battle, I just have to say I just love those books. Sure, balance for them is crap, but they created somethings new and interesting in terms of gameplay and flavor. The books were something fresh and intriguing in a well trod genre.
>>94509969Ah, mixed up the digital product. Partly because I've seen unironic proponents of Roll20 making Baldur's Gate 3 redundant, to my intense confusion.>>94510097>four power tiers covering all 20 levelsWhat kind of rarely-relevant frills did you use for 1st-4th?>and added a descriptor system [Armor], [Weapon], etcOn the one hand shoving effects in wildly atypical slots is one of the major sources of value for WoL optimization. On the other it's REALLY good for sorting things out to draw down decision paralysis.>One new descriptor was [Investiture], which improves one of your existing abilities but turns it into an item-based one.The high-level summary sounds like properly cannibalizing the remainder of Item Familiar functions. The details sound like an absolute headache because fucking with a character's level breakdown like that does HORRIBLE things.>>94510586ToB Maneuvers aren't At-Will and the refresh mechanics means they're not really per-encounter either, while the subsystem has no daily function. And ToB to 5e was only eight years.
casters are supposed to be overpowered
>>94499655How do you lose flavor by adding options to the game?
>>94499950Why are powerful martials bad, not powerful wizards?
>>94506656Even today?Guess my group is the exception.Playing levels 9ish to 15ish is so cool.
>>94500238There's no reason for such a divide to exist in the first place. Most systems don't have one.
>>94500268What's realistic about lightning bolt, prismatic wall, or force cage?
>>94506656Pun pun is available at first level.
>>94510697They're supposed to have the spectacular world-changing peak throughput events, but they're not supposed to be all-encompassing. There's supposed to be room for Conan doing the gigawizard in, even if he needs to borrow Arthur's dagger of invisibility.>>94510712It's not about being too powerful, ToBbies pale in comparison to the Shock Trooper slaughterhouse. It's that the off-the-wall bullshittium is out of place for the Medievalesque standard-issue and it didn't signpost orientalism hard enough to properly separate itself.>>94510720"Guy who beats bears to death with trees" is just too different a feel from "learned man who applies esoteric knowledge for Pure Bullshit" to have EVERYONE tap the "esoteric knowledge for Pure Bullshit" mechanic.Exalted has the right of it, there's a shared Pure Bullshit mechanic everyone important gets to use powered by narrative causality juice, then there's a bunch of mostly-tangential weird shit usually, but not always, using the same narrative causality juice.Doing that to D&D requires taking the d20 modern approach of classes belonging to particular tiers of play then beating the 1-20 standard to death with BECMI so that all the grounded mudcore people can be condemned to the baby pool where their whining stops crippling the Fighter-types in a world where 6th+ level spells do what they're made for.
>>94510727Where in this book does it allow initiators to cast those spells?
>>94510986Page 20 under the Swordsage's "adaptation" section, oddly enough.
>>94510697Casters are supposed to be overpowered on occasion, not at all times, but too few DMs adhere to the intended design of 4 challenging encounters per day.
>>94506656It's been maybe 15 years since I've had a 3,5 game start lower than level 10.
>>94511367It's 4 equal CR encounters. Less if you fight stronger enemies, where you are more likely to need the spellcasters to bail you out, and more if you fight weaker enemies, where the spellcasters don't need to do much at all. 4 equal CR encounters is way too few to put a dent in spells per day unless you're level 1-3.
>>94510712Because D&D casters have always needed to be the most special snowflakes at the table, and they shit themselves with rage any time this isn't even slightly the case, and then act like its the game at fault, so they scream and piss and shit themselves repeatedly until it's "fixed"
>>94511076My guy, that's a section for the author to spitball ideas, not an actual class.
>>94511627I know, a while ago I got into an argument in the 3.5 general with this guy who vastly overrated the value of per-day abilities, Zerth Cenobite was his example, because his DM almost never did more than 1-2 encounters per day, so it fucked up all the class design.
>>94507824while this is pathfinder stuff, and third party stuff at that, I do think that the pathfinder 3pp version of incarnum (akashic) has drastically better lore rather than the dumb incarnum lore, it actually reflavors it into a more Indian/Persian/SE-asia style of magic that's meant to be a different approach to magical study which I greatly enjoy
>>94511814I've played in games like that myself. Some DM's just have very short dungeons or none. I wouldn't use that to judge every other campaign though since you're meant to have something like 10 encounters a day which is ridiculous.
>>94507824>>94511957If I were writing a 3pp "legally distinct incarnum" book then I'd include a special material you can invest with essentia... and make it hihi'irokane, just so I have an excuse to be cheeky and name all the feats after shades of red.
>>94499625I've always found that book somewhat disappointing. I feel the Path of War stuff for Pathfinder scratches the itch a lot better. Which isn't to say that I don't like the Bo9S. It walked so PoW could run. And the maneuver initiating system... I'm going to come right out and say it. I hate per day abilities. I've hated them since I got into D&D at 16 and I hate them a decade and a half later. I've always hated the whole Vancian casting system, as a matter of fact. Psionic Power Points are a slight improvement, but I really don't like abilities that you can only use a certain number of times per day. It feels weird, narratively, for one thing. People have criticized 4e and its "you can swing a sword really good only once a day" enough, but I feel like that applies to wiggling your fingers and saying magic words as well. Then, from a mechanical perspective, it forces you into multiple encounters a day. But not too many! If you do too few, then casters trivialize gameplay. And don't you dare let an artificer near down-time, the results could be catastrophic! Too many encounters, on the other hand, and the party gets attritioned to death. I just feel like the DMG really undersells the importance of 4 moderately challenging fights a day. It seems to say, "we recommend this, but, hey, it's your game, play it your way!" when it should say, "You can change this, but the entirety of this game's meager balance budget was spent assuming limited daily resources. Utilize time pressure unless you absolutely know what you are doing, and probably even then."Bo9S maneuvers and recovery fixes a lot of the problems I have. I just wish they had a better spread of effects.
>>94510867why is it too different a feel? what does that mean?
>>94510986reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, huh?
>>94511367if you do four encounters, the casters get more powerful, not less. a fighter without buffs from the casters is worse than useless. a fighter without healing from the casters is dead.
>>94512168Ten encounters a day is fine. A day is not a session.
>>94499625it was only bad to the crowd that really believes the 12th time they have a 5+ minute spiel to describe "I hit with stick" in order to try to one up the caster will be better than the last 11
>>94510712I don't mind powerful martials, I just think martial characters should be martials, not muscle wizards.
Because this thread is D&D 3E related, it was the first I saw, and it's convenient, I'm going to ask it here.I'm going through all the official base classes made for D&D 3E including from the Dragonlance books as well as from the Dragon Compendium in order to make sure they are each enjoyable to play on their own, including changing a bunch of the core rules, and blah blah blah.What I need help with is the Shadowcaster. I know the one who made the Shadowcaster did bring about a fix to the design (namely to make the class less rigid), but my problem with the Shadowcaster is that I'm not wholly convinced it feels like Shadowcasting. I think taking up Mysteries on the Paths is fun, but it also feels like what an occultist can pull off.Shadow casting is all about dealing with the reflection of what we see, and understanding that the reflection is as much the real thing as the thing making the reflection. Is there a mechanic I can add to the Shadowcaster that can better reflect that (pun intended)? Or am I just full of shit?Anyways, I'll keep on remaking the Truenamer from the ground up in the meanwhile. I adore the Truenamer. It's too bad the Skill DCs are not only ridiculously high and how a Truenamer effectively gets worse at Truenaming as they gain levels, but that the Skill based magic of Truenaming wasn't implemented terribly well either. Glad to know Star Wars SAGA Edition has its Force Powers expressed as a Skill check (Use the Force) for me to remake the Utterances.
>>94513743>It feels weird, narratively, for one thing.Read Dying Earth, now. The reason why is because that hour of preparation early in the day is doing most of the magic, which was a lot clearer under AD&D slot-by-slot preparation that made the required downtime scale consistently with magic output instead of the embarrassing exponents WotC ended up with by ripping out most of the breaks>Then, from a mechanical perspective, it forces you into multiple encounters a day.Mechanics dictating story pacing is just how TTRPGs work, a given ruleset can only support a rather limited set of campaign structures. The moment you have two resource paradigms on different timers the scheduling restriction is reduced to a single point where the two are balanced against eachotherThis can be mitigated with variant rules, but then you have to balance each resource paradigm for each time-scale variant separately because the raw mathematical facts of game design remain>>94513862It's dissonant with the medievalesque primarily European fantasy standards because it's high-Wuxia based. Fundamentally subjective tone and theme issue applicable to the core rulebook Monk>>94513871>if you do four encounters, the casters get more powerful, not less.I think that post was criticizing LESS than four encounters per day giving the casters more spells per encounter>a fighter without buffs from the casters is worse than uselessIt takes quite the high level or relatively scarce lower-CR enemies for this to be the case assuming WBL is being followed, as there's only three necessary items to cover something like 80% of monsters out to CR 15 or so. Magic weapon, source of flight, tactical teleport>a fighter without healing from the casters is dead.So are the non-healing casters, this is a primary pacing governor and thus the expected source is locked STRICTLY to days passing instead of an eight-hour rest period. You could juice the Heal skill to inflate rest recovery to similar effect
>>94514425We have a 3.X General, currently >>94475236. Reply given there.
>>94510867I disagree, insofar the design goals of ToB was freeing up dependence on feats and money (both highly limited resources) in order to allow even unoptimized concepts, like a sword and board or TWF combatant, to still hold their own in line with system expectations.A SnB warblade can meaningfully contribute to any combat scenario without having to take the so called 'necessary' feats, and can operate without the necessity of a caster buffing them in order to handle higher skill level threats.I think that in terms of design philosophy, by the numbers, it absolutely achieves it's intent.Even the more supernatural choices are that, choices, and the more mundane options can fit entirely within the ideal of say, Authurian or Norse legend, in a game laden with supernatural beings to confront the players.Hell, I once saw someone take a Crusader as an expy of a WF Bretonnian knight of the Lady, and it worked out wonderfully. It allows for more ideas to work out on the table, without allowances from the DM to fulfill the concept.>it reminds me of years ago, a player at my table wanted nothing more than to play a standard, by the book paladin>rolled his stats out and everything>he struggled to fulfill the ideal, and it wasn't until I gave him a Holy Avenger that he was able to actually meaningfully contribute in combat as a gallant, first in the fray warrior of justice>it wasn't a good feeling watching him try to live out a worthy ideal and fail because he had to fight the game mechanics>even more, he wasn't trying to optimize at all, even in the face of my counsel, only choosing feats and skills that fed in to the ideal>it got really bad once he realized how often difficult terrain cropped up in game, denying him even Spirited Charges from his mighty steed
>>94511957personally, I prefer incarnum's lore. it tells you where incarnum comes from and what many of the soulmelds are based on, and all the melds have fluff text for the basic shape and the binds.with akasha it's just "old magic lol".
>>94515943>I think that in terms of design philosophy, by the numbers, it absolutely achieves it's intent.Which is high-floor, but still falls well short of the ceiling of previous material. It is trivial to get +80 damage to every attack until the start of your next turn, which is a distinction very few people take note of because AoOs are usually the non-PA build. When you do, Karmic Strike or Robilar's Gambit suddenly makes a lot of sense because it's now applying the back-end of Ubercharging to anyone who thinks your -20 AC is an invitation to be pasted. And anyone who thinks any in-reach survivors can walk away safely.
>>94516400>Karmic Strike or Robilar's GambitI remember there was a Lighting Mace build that paired with these to get rediculous numbers of AoO.Fucker took a level of bard plus a white Raven feat that let him swift-action bardic music as a swift action. He fluffed it that his character was using his enemies skulls as the drum for his music effects.
>>94516400To be fair, it is an invitation against enemies with ranged attack and doesn't work if something turns off AoOs. It's somewhat harder to turn off ToB in turn and even without everything that goes into the Ubercharger combo they still get pounce and +IL to damage on charges.
>>94515943Yeah this. It meant that people didn't have to look through the minmax forums just to make fighters and paladins half decent. I thought ToB was the best book in 3.5 that helped balance martials and casters. The flavour isn't for everyone but can be integrated into a homebrew world if you plan for it from the start. In the game I'm currently running it's just part of fighting traditions and you can run into ogres/trolls that know maneuvers if they're strong enough, all high ranking enemies use them etc.
>>94514010If you define martial as limited to what's possible for a highly trained human, martials can't be powerful, by definition.
>>94514829what fantasy standards?
>>94514829Yes, it was. And the point is that as the number of encounters between tests grows, the relevance of characters that don't have spell slots goes to zero. The fact that most DMs only run one or two encounters a day is exactly the reason that many people don't think there's a balance problem.
>>94514829No, it doesn't take a high level. A wizard casting glitteredust on a group of monsters has just contributed the equivalent of four to eight rounds of fighter attacks. It only gets worse from there.
>>94514829No, casters without healing are still more effective than fighters without healing, since casters actually have methods available to them to prevent damage, or make it irrelevant.
>>94518228It's hilarious to me that a feat like Minor Polymorph exists.
>>94518192...The norms of the considerable majority of content? Though the original boxed set Appendix N stretches quite the variety of material, all that genre fiction inspiration comprising D&D's roots shuffles in place around "vaguely Middle Ages Europe" relatively cleanly. The Far Eastern exaggerations of monastic martial arts do not, and so stick out quite harshly.>>94518211That is VERY backwards. The expected rate takes non-negligible consideration of when NOT to cast spells to get the slots to last through it in ways one to two does not, and there's quite a few pieces of material that allow Martials to shamble through some frankly absurd endurance gauntlets that do-everything-by-spell casters would find themselves helpless in rather quickly.>>94518224Glitterdust isn't a complete shut-down, the enemies still have to be killed. Which to do inside the 3-4 rounds of when Glitterdust is a top-level spell is rather likely to demand a Martial.>>94518228Overwhelmingly harshly rate-limited methods, which require rather specific choices to be worth more than the bountiful ability to actually kill shit Martials receive. Most save-or-"lose" spells are so because they make it trivial to kill the subjects with attacks, which accomplishing inside the spell durations spends much of the campaign at odds with making the most of the proactive narrative tool spells.It's POSSIBLE for that to happen, but it requires spectacular system mastery or a spreadsheet to pull off on any regular basis. Whereas the binary "have Charge line>everything in reach of target is dead" Martial is the end of a completely obvious Unga Bunga math push. The result of these two factors is that PARTIES are generally better off having both because there's a big optimization range where bringing an Ubercharger and slapping permissions on him is more slot-efficient than a redundant spellcaster.
>>94518187I still say a good baseline is that a 10th level martial should be capable of matching or exceeding all real-world athletic world records with ease. And I mean all of them, not just one or two. Tenth is already supposed to be in superhuman tier, and yet 20th level characters are outclassed by real-world Olympians.
>>94514829>Read Dying Earth, now.I've been in D&D-space long enough to have some idea of where the casting system for 3.5 came from. From what I understand, it was a series of books where people did long, complex rituals to cast spells, but could just put off the last couple of words and movements until they needed them, kind of trapping a semi-living spell in their minds as they did so. Or something like that. Being able to memorize two or even three spells at a time meant someone had a considerable level of talent. The thing is, none of what I just described in any way justifies spells-per-day. I would much rather a system where wizards have to do a 5 minute ritual (or longer, for higher level spells) between every fight for the one or, if they're high enough level, two spells they can hold at a time. Out of combat? As long as nothing interrupts your rituals, go at it. In combat? You get one. This would, of course, mean that low level healing spells could be spammed out of combat, but, considering how cheap a Wand of Cure Light Wounds is in 3.5, I honestly don't have a problem with that.>Mechanics dictating story pacing is just how TTRPGs work, a given ruleset can only support a rather limited set of campaign structures.My problem isn't so much with the limitation as the lack of transparency regarding the limitation. By 6th level, a party can reasonably hole up in a Rope Trick for as long as they need to. Even lacking that, it's generally not too difficult to fortify a position to the point where encounters happen on the players' terms, not the DMs. The only way I know of to counterbalance this is by the DM saying "You have 2 weeks to make it there and back again" to force the players out of just resting whenever they see fit. Again, my problem is not that D&D can only tell stories about racing against the clock. My problem is that that's not in any way how the game presents itself.
>>94518187Anon I'm not denying that martials can't be powerful. I just think they should be powerful without being muscle wizards
>>94520607Explain to me what "powerful" is. If it's limited by what a mortal human being is capable of, even a world-class Olympian, it isn't powerful at all in comparison to most low level spell casters.
>>94520607>I'm not denying that martials can't be powerful. I just think they should be powerful without being muscle wizardsExplain how you think this should be achieved.
>>94520607A mid-level martial character should be able to stand by a castle wall, punch a block, and make it fly out the other side hard enough to kill a normal man. And this is not a magical ability, he just IS that strong, his abilities are unaffected by things like antimagic fields.
>>94521530That's retarded. They're not super man.
>>94521879They Should be. The options are muscle wizard or superman if you want martials to keep up with casters. Trying to keep martials within human limits means falling behind wizards.You can't have your cake and eat it too.
>>94516400What I would ask you is why do you think it needs to follow in the footsteps of niche, absolute top end optimizing strategies, when the intent is clearly to establish a practical floor and reasonable ceiling for fisticuffs characters?In the long end of things, in actual play, there is not really a need to do 80+ damage per hit in a full attack; that is the system breaking down away from what it was imagined to be played like.Trivializing combat at the pc's effective level isn't a flex, it is signs of the numbers fraying and bad design.
>>94521530>>94521879>>94522402I think superhuman is fine, but you're describing a dude whose punch is better than a 3rd or 4th level spell, I would tend to put that at higher level especially since I don't want strength to be the fighter's main thing (it should be the action movie survival factor).
>>94522402This was more resolved in older editions with the Lord status, where you had unbreakable, 100% loyal warriors, a castle, and got money for free.You didn't have the same killing power, individually, but you had social clout that could not simply be denied.In 3.x, wizards got MORE power, and martials got LESS power compared to before, and that is the problem.
>>94521879They absolutely are. A high level fighter can fall from orbit(20d6 damage) and get back up just fine. That's well into supetman tertitory already.That's also the design philodophy of d&d as far back ad TSR. Level 15-20 fighters are supposed to be superheroes.The issues is that 3e is that it inconsistant about what martials are capable of at high level, so they end up able to survive nukes, but have human strength/speed and can't figure out dodging or parrying without burning 3 doctorates(feats) in obscure combat styles(dragon magazine content).
>>94522451>it should be the action movie survival factorAction movie dude isn't going to be able to keep up with doctor strange or doctor fate. "Normal guy fights on par with god-wizards using nothing but grit and determination" is a great premise of a comic book or movie, but falls apart entirely in a TTRPG.>>94522460Agreed. 3e removing weapon speeds and spell segments, on top of neutering material component costs, exponentially buffed wizards.Trying to re-enforce matetial components as a power limitation causes 3e players to immediately start screaming and crying though. So the only other option is bufging martials to superman or muscle wizard status.
>>94522417...If this is about the second in >>94510867 as I've been operating under, I've never been saying they SHOULD be, I've been saying the "Weeabu Fightan Magic" complaint is a tonal/archetypical one rather than a power one as demonstrated by the fact they aren't MORE powerful but rather easier to be a competent level of power with.And pushing Power Attack or Charge multiplier isn't niche because there's a wide variety of material for each supporting a number of approaches. They're just how Fighters get damage, and the Ubercharger is achieved with rather straightforward Unga Bunga chasing of it.>>945224603.X Wizards need to dig around quite a bit to get more power than a TSR era one COULD have, the issue is that almost all the fiddly bullshit making it very rare for earlier edition Wizards to pull off nonsense with it was cut. It's still plenty rare because it's still well in the weeds, but it's merely obscure rather than actively roadblocked like it used to be.>>94522502Referential humor hunting and spreadsheet inventory management of otherwise-worthless baubles is a dogshit balancing mechanism anyways.
>>94522502"Normal guy fights on par with god-wizards using nothing but grit and determination" is an illusion that you have to sell, and it's totally doable especially in combat, the hard part is giving them non-combat utility that's on part with teleportation and shit.
>>94522537>an illusion that you have to sell,And that's why you can't base a game system on it. That's not something every DM is gonna be able to pull off, nor should it be expected that they should try. You can to that as a one-off or specific campaign, but that'd be the exception rather than the norm.
>>94499625No, it was the color of shit and intrinsically ruined fighters.
>>94522460>In 3.x, wizards got MORE power, and martials got LESS power compared to before, and that is the problem.Neither of those is even remotely true
>>94522524>Referential humor hunting and spreadsheet inventory management of otherwise-worthless baubles is a dogshit balancing mechanism anyways.Its a way gor the DM to limit specific spells for specific stories without needing to ban the spell completely. Fly or waterbreathing can be absolutely broken in one adventure, but necessary to progress in another.Besides, wizards are still spreadsheet hunting and doing inventory management organizing the limited pages of their spellbooks and memorizing spell slots. They also need to keep track of some components anyway, so very little is changed besides balance.
>>94522595
>>94522565I don't think you're hearing me, it's the system's job to sell the idea that a high-level superhuman fighter is actually just a normal guy with superhuman grit and superhuman determination. If you (as a game designer) don't think you can pull that off then you should just stop calling it a fighter. Have fighter go to level 5 or 10 and then make them pick a superhero class for levels 11-20.
>>94522524>And pushing Power Attack or Charge multiplier isn't niche because there's a wide variety of material for each supporting a number of approaches. They're just how Fighters get damage, and the Ubercharger is achieved with rather straightforward Unga Bunga chasing of it.And the design point of ToB is making it so you need not rely on power attack and it's related material to pull your own weight.Like I said, the Bretonnian knight pc I saw was absolutely able to hold his own, and more when it came to party support, in combat and out of it, without having to take feats and such considered almost mandatory.>>94522595see>>94522502Add to that, less time needed to memorize spells, being able to cast while threatened period, not auto losing the spell if you take ANY damage, and shorter casting times across the board.Automatically getting new spells for the bonus round.On the other end, fighters had less defenses compared to earlier, higher hp on enemies was a martial problem to solve, lack of magic item guarding that was an advantage to fighters compared to other classes, more reliance on ability scores.
>>94522609I'm well aware you've never played 2e nor read a page of a 3e book, you don't need to double down on it
>>94522537>is an illusion that you have to sell, and it's totally doable especially in combat,I see this happening in my table.Somebody makes a Barbarian is usually looking for a very specific experience. Going into a rage and dealing tons of damage with their weapon attacks, which is easily attainable.>the hard part is giving them non-combat utility that's on part with teleportation and shit.Exactly. Which is where magic items can help a ton.Of course, there's always skills, but even something like a simple Anklet of translocation, 2/day 10ft teleport, can help a "mundane" character participate in a situation or another where it would have no recourse otherwise.That also goes for things like a character wanting to play a dickass stealthy rogue and using magic items to become harder to detect and such.Our Rogue loves his Ring of blinking.Is that just giving a mundane character limited access to magic? Yes, but if that synergizes with the character's abilities and reinforces the character fantasy, I think that's working as intended.
>>94499625>Was this book really as bad as people say?Mixed, the idea was good, the execution had some passing flaws (like for example the self-healing-on-hit effect that could be defined better) and the fact that the new classes Warblade, Crusader and Swordsage are just Fighter, Paladin and Monk but better in every way. As usual the real issue with 3.x splats was that most of the time they weren't properly playtested against the core rules.
>>94522617It's called a fighter because you're in a mefieval fantasy setting. They aren't going to have a concept of superhumans in skintight spandex.On top of that, Superhero fighters is as old as 1e, which didn't have the issues 3e has. Your argument fundamentally flawed.
>>94522621>2e casters that literally had genuine flawless clonechains that only cost gold and 3.0 style infinite caster undead stacks in a system without wbl and basically no magic items compared to 3e>somehow martials were better off when they had a 99.9% chance to not even be able to fly at 20 and you categorically could not even damage creatures which would only have DR in 3elmaoThe fact that monster hp went up 2-3x doesn't really disadvantage fighters when their damage per round shot into the four digits pretty early in 3.0 and continuously went up after that.
>>94522636>the self-healing-on-hit effect that could be defined betterI reckon that was only a problem if you bought in to the idea of hp solely as meat points.>they weren't properly playtested against the core rulesWhere did the rules break, anon? I'm aware of stuff like Iron Heart Surge not working as it was written the way it seemed to be intended.
>>94522623If you projecedt any harder you could give powerpoint presentations.
>>94522648>a bunch of things nobody said, implied or intimatedAlmost forgot I was on 4chan, but idiots are everywhere online.gb2/v/ and scream about 'troons'.
>>94522636>As usual the real issue with 3.x splats was that most of the time they weren't properly playtested against the core rules.Core rules are unironically the worst rules in 3.5 though, nogames>the new classes Warblade, Crusader and Swordsage are just Fighter, Paladin and Monk but better in every way.>crusader>better than paladin in every waylmao
>>94522662No arguments I see. I presume then that you never played either game and are just whining that you've been exposed?
>>94522649>I reckon that was only a problem if you bought in to the idea of hp solely as meat pointsFor 3e specifically, that's what they are. Other D20 systems like Midnight and Star War made it clear in the mechanics how to make hp that isn't meat-points, but D&D doesn't do what either of them did.
>>94522673They've always been meat points>Star WarVitality/wound point games quickly circle back to just ignoring hp much the same way you largely ignore AC in 3e, I find.
>>94522649>I reckon that was only a problem if you bought in to the idea of hp solely as meat points.I think they may have worked both thematically and mechsnically better if they were treated like temporary hp (as for the raging barbarian extra hp).>Where did the rules break, anon? I'm aware of stuff like Iron Heart Surge not working as it was written the way it seemed to be intended.Nothing overtly breaks, like i said the ToB content is just straight better than the core one, to the point is almost preferable to substitute the fighter, paladin and monk tout-court (unless going really hard with optimization, but still the gap is deemed to build up again as the characters progress).
>>94522666>No arguments>3 posts worth of them ITTGood night, anon.>>94522673That may work for breaking items, but it doesn't explain how nonlethal hp damage works, if you apply the same logic, or massive damage saves.
>>94522537People say that you pick the Barbarian class if you want to be Conan defeating evil sorcerers, but Conan was an expert historian and linguist and cartographer and commander and could easily pick up and use equipment he'd never seen before, etc.D&D takes half the stuff that was the province of martials, and makes it the province of casters instead.
>>94522726The 2e Fighter would cover this, anon.Even in 2e, Conan was a Rogue/Fighter multiclass.
>>94522722>nonlethal hp damageNon-lethal hp damage isn't a thing in 3.5Non-lethal damage is a pool of points you track separately to your hp and when that pool exceeds your current hp you go unconscious.
>>94522722There were no arguments made, other than a bunch of shit which was already addressed, retardStop posting
>>94522685>Vitality/wound point games quickly circle back to just ignoring hpYes, which is why I prefer "meat points" games. I have zero problem with high level martials having the durability of superman in-universe.
>>94522726You pick the Barbarian class if you want to be Cú Chullain turning inside out with rage into a horrifying monster constantly surrounded by a cloud of his own boiling blood, who kills a billion enemies with each swing of his sword, can only be harmed by weapons crafted by a legendary smith specifically to defeat him, and whose dead body spasms to cut off the hands of people who try to rob it.And then the DM shuts it down for being too anime for his European-themed game.
>>94522605>Its a way gor the DM to limit specific spells for specific stories without needing to ban the spell completely. Fly or waterbreathing can be absolutely broken in one adventure, but necessary to progress in another.Which applies just as well to more inherently worthwhile components.>Besides, wizards are still spreadsheet hunting and doing inventory management organizing the limited pages of their spellbooks and memorizing spell slots.And these are highly-fungible resources rather than a weirdass Easter-egg hunt for dumb jokes that inevitably cause extremely stupid derails if the Wizard wants to seek them out.>>94522621>And the design point of ToB is making it so you need not rely on power attack and it's related material to pull your own weight....You're still making non-sequiturs. Again, my point is that the "Weeabu Fightan Magic" complaint can't be a power thing because I find that the text supports this point too obviously.
>>94522646>It's called a fighter because you're in a mefieval fantasy setting.It's called a fighter because it isn't a divine champion or a godblood or a dark knight or anything like that, it's just a weaponguy. So, to design a fighter that works at high-level, you have to give them a superhuman level of power while disguising that power as grit and determination. Hitpoints and resistances are great, because people will buy the idea of a nonmagical action hero who can survive blatantly-unsurvivable shit, they've seen it before. Improved action economy is also good because it's extremely powerful but it doesn't feel like magic, we know that fighters in the real world can think and act faster than normal people, so it makes sense for a higher-level fighter to be able to think and act even faster than that. 5e action surge is a great mechanic (and I never would have designed it, because I would have said that limited-use abilities are antithetical to fighters, but it's a martial ability that gets more powerful over time and that can be used creatively to do things other than attack, that's what they need). In combat, magic resistance can be used to balance basically anything, because it's as powerful as magic is. It's also the most satisfying option for the players who actively dislike magic.I didn't literally mean "superhero class", I meant divine champion or godblood or dark knight, something that's explicitly a fighter-with-special-powers. Personally I've always thought that paladins should have to start out as fighters and get their powers later. But if you want a level11+ fighter that's as good as everyone else, then you're trying to create a superpowered character who doesn't have superpowers, that isn't literally possible but that's fine because you don't literally have to do it. You just have to sell the players on the idea that this is a high-level version of a guy with no powers.
>>94522806>Which applies just as well to more inherently worthwhile components.So you want every spell to cost gold to cast?>And these are highly-fungible resources rather than a weirdass Easter-egg hunt for dumb jokes that inevitably cause extremely stupid derails if the Wizard wants to seek them out.You mean something like:>"I'm almost out of bat poop, is there any available in town?"> "No">"Fuck">"Yep">"What if I..">"No"What a massive sidequest that was.
>>94522834>So, to design a fighter that works at high-level, you have to give them a superhuman level of power Yes>while disguising that power as grit and determinationNo
>>94511367I feel you're jumping onto a misnomer, cause we're talking about casters & combat. Casters were NEVER overpowered in combat.Ye ol Char Op boards had a running joke that seems to have been lost to the ages that the most powerful, damaging dealing and optimized combat spell you can cast was targeting your own Fighter with Haste.Casters were OP because they could bypass locks, breakdown doors, calm animals, fly, smooth talk the prince, or by pass combats entirely. This of course gets corrupted over the years and people forget what they are even arguing about... and assume it means combat I guess?Actually fighting-fighting a fight? As in: You deal damage, they deal damage? Fighters most or less have always been equal to casters, probably in line if your graph there. It's why fighter are tier 4 on that stupid tier-list and not the very bottom, because they are decent to good at the one thing they do: Fight a straight up Fight.
>>94522726I think that Conan had rogue levels, but I've seen some good arguments that he was a single-class barbarian with armor proficiencies and average mental stats, he was simply played by a skilled player.
>>94522834Why are you do stuck on the idea that fighters can't be superhuman? The name of the class isn't even an in-universe thing.News-flash, Conan the Barbarian was not a barbarian classNothing stops a fighter with a fancy template calling themselves a divine champion. The class name is just for players.
>>94522847Do you count Batman as "superhuman level of power disguised as grit and determination"?Given that comics routinely show him getting punched by people powerful enough to knock out Superman then getting back up, reacting to the Flash, dodging Darkseid's Omega Beams when they're supposed to hit automatically, and surviving them when they're supposed to kill even immortals.
>>94522851>Ye ol Char Op boards had a running joke that seems to have been lost to the agesBecause it stopped being true.High level casters Can out-damage martials rather easily, but they typically have better option for ending combat other than raw damage. Shivering Touch for example is an easy way to end 90% of high-level enemies, it's one 3rd level spell then a Coup de Grace.
>>94522870Who the fuck cares?No one is saying fighters are all batman clones.Besides, batman is clearly a rogue.
>>94522847You can do what you want, but people are going to keep telling you that it isn't really a fighter, and they might not know how to explain themselves but they'll still be right. It's not that they can't be superhuman in any respect, it's that you are trying not to make a point of it, "punching down castle walls" at mid level is the wrong way. It's better if all their physical abilities, endurance, athleticism etc all increase slowly along with the other stuff. They can end up being superhuman in every way as long as it doesn't happen all at once. >>94522634Okay, sure, but then what are the spellcasters doing with their magic items? The spellcasters are still going to end up with more noncombat utility, though D&D style magic items do help somewhat, as they give "basic" spellcasting functions to nonspellcasters while effectively (or literally) just giving more spells/day to casters. It would work nicely if the world-breaking noncombat spells were gated behind magic items. The sorcerer gets a weird bird idol that lets him cast a flying spell, the fighter gets winged boots which let him hover at will but not as fast as the sorcerer, it's fair to both of them while also preserving the basic differences between fighting and spellcasting.
>>94522870nta but I would say yes. I actually think that you can maybe do a better job than what DC does. The most interesting version of Batman is just a normal human who is three steps ahead.
>>94522935>people are going to keep telling youNo, You are the only one I see saying thst.
>>94522908>Because it stopped being true.>High level casters Can out-damage martials rather easily,...Hmn, no. There are/were plenty of "combat builds" casters that could deal literally thousands of damage in an round or single attack. The record has to have been in the millions or something stupid like that.The overall point was that it was a waste of time and resources in a team game. Building a combat mage was stupid cause it only handled one situation. It's why evocation as the whole school (for specialization) was ranked rather low (even thou there are some stand out spells), and why the Warmage base class was ranked as "It sucks"Yeah caster COULD outdamage melees, but it was considered a waste of time, resources, and precious character-build-options. When a fighter with basic PHB feats can out damage a disintegrate spell all by himself.So if you are saying COULD casters outdamage melees? Yeah, the answer is yes. I agree with you.Was a caster considered game breaking or "optimized" if you did? No, the answer was a hard no.
>>94522851One of the problems was fighters trying to "tank" just by being hard to kill, without any ability to protect their allies. As exemplified by Dwarven Defender, an immobile wall which is only really good at blocking chokepoints and useless whenever enemies can just walk around you.Early on, the closest you could get to controlling enemy position involved a Spiked Chain, and people hated it because such a weird weapon shouldn't be the default.Then Knight had a literal "grab aggro" ability, and later Crusader could pick up more subtle options like punishing foes for attacking your allies or increasing the number of situations where you can make AoOs.
>>94522843>So you want every spell to cost gold to cast?100 CP per GP means a 2nd level character's expected wealth can be divided into 90,000 units of currency. It may be extremely far into pocket-change and hyper-situational for lower level spells, but a trivial nominal value pegged to a miniscule non-spell applicability still grounds it in the world in a way the pure bookkeeping chore is not.>You mean something like:The problem is that the DM cannot declare the player character does not pursue the thing needed for the spell, so when some player at some table inevitably refuses a contextless "no" to working around a CHANGE in availability the DM is left entirely on their own to justify lack of access to random crap that's often obscenely commonplace. The material components were not assigned as sensible restrictions, they were assigned as arbitrary tokens frequently according to dumb jokes.
>>94522969>>94522908Actually I was curious so I have to look it up.Builds I could still find have melees Fighters/Barbarians/Ranges that could deal in the 500k regions.Specific nuke style casters got it close to 1M (one case where it was infinite in very specific circumstances, but kinda sacrificed being useful able to do anything else, casting other spells, or even leave their designated Sanctum.)But funny enough the Lords of damage were probably no surprise the DMM Clerics, at 300k ~ 2M damage.And the king of Damage was the Locate city Bomb, who is notably a Paladin. Who's damage could be in the Billions based on distance and Math I couldn't bother with this morning.(Paladin to get the most out of it. Sorcerers & Clerics could pick up the spell, but then lack enough feats to pull of the epic extended range version.)
>>94522969Anon, you just admitted yourself that casters can easily outperform martials in their own area of expertise, which was the anon you're replying to's main point.Literally disproving the statement said here: >>94522851>Actually fighting-fighting a fight? As in: You deal damage, they deal damage? Fighters most or less have always been equal to casters, probably in line if your graph there. It's why fighter are tier 4 on that stupid tier-list and not the very bottom, because they are decent to good at the one thing they do: Fight a straight up FightA caster able to do all the "optimized" things you mentioned is better off patying up with an "unoptimized" caster, whose capable of outputting more damage than the fighter can ever dream of, than the pathetic fighter. That's the core issue.(And that's if we ignore the fact that the anon you replied to clearly said casters didn't need to do hp damage to win in the first place).
>>94522975I don't think people actually worried too much about that. I think worrying about pulling Aggro and "Tanking" like a video game is it's own problem... and more of a modern one. (At least 2010 "Modern")Usually getting a fighter or monk adjustment to an enemy where if the enemy moved to get at caster provoked AoOs they risked incurring a lot of damage or tripped. No Knight challenge or Reach weapons required. It was normally enough in any average game to mostly keep them off your casters back. Locking meleers into the dread 5-ft-step dance.But you're not wrong. I just don't know a damn soul who even bothered with Dwarven Defender.
>>94523008>Locate city Bomb, who is notably a PaladinAre you high? Locate city isn't a paladin or cleric spell. It's an arcane caster build.
>>94522908>coup de grace killing anything>shivering touch being some high-op secretget better bait>>94522969Damage records for actual practical casting were incomprehensibly lower than the damage records for martials, but it was a moot point because casters could give themselves literal +1000000 strength with a single spell and enough magical rats. You're right that emulating a T4 gimmick (onerounding CR+8 enemies through damage) is not what made casters strong but they were better at direct combat by a lot - the biggest single limiter on caster DPR was that people didn't write it down if it amounted to "as high as you want it to be".>It's why evocation as the whole school (for specialization) was ranked rather low (even thou there are some stand out spells)It wasn't even the good direct damage school, Range: Long notwithstanding, because it was SR:Yes and so didn't work a lot of things you need damage to work on. A similar problem to sneak attack abusers, essentially.You're otherwise correct.>>94523008(you)
>>94522992>justify lack of access to random crap that's often obscenely commonplace.Because access to kirin eyelashes is such an everyday occurance.
>>94523045>shivering touch being some high-op secretThe fact it isn't is the point anon. It's an ancient, well-known issue that casters begin to stomp martial as level rises.
>>94523028I think you took the phrase "Casters were NEVER overpowered in combat." as "Cast SUCK in combat" which are not the same.Either way I think you are missing the point, that or I'm not explaining it well enough.
>>94523046>kirin eyelashesDo you mean>A tiny ball of bat guano and sulfur. (fireball)>A wing feather from any bird. (fly)>A leather thong, bound around the arm or a similar appendage. (FoM)>A shaving of licorice root. (Haste)>literally nothing because it's Components: V only (teleport etc.)
>>94523050By the time you have shivering touch martials literally do more damage than the combined HP of the entire party and all the monsters you are fighting each round, and the go-to is maximized shivering touch anyway because 3d6 is hardly reliable.
>>94523057>Freedom of movement requires A leather thongI never got that it was a bdsm joke until just now.
>>94523008>And the king of Damage was the Locate city Bomb, who is notably a Paladin. Who's damage could be in the Billions based on distance and Math I couldn't bother with this morning.>(Paladin to get the most out of it. Sorcerers & Clerics could pick up the spell, but then lack enough feats to pull of the epic extended range version.)What are you talking about? Locate City is a Bard, Ranger and Sor/Wiz spell, and you need to stack metamagic on it that raises its level. A paladin *can* do it by using the Find Temple spell instead, but its radius is much smaller (20 miles at lv20 compared to 200 miles for a wizard).The "billions of damage" thing also never worked because Explosive Spell takes the shortest path to push you out of the spell, and Locate City is two-dimensional. It's mainly useful for adding Fell Drain so that all the commoners in its radius die and transform into wights.
>>94523096>Locate City is two-dimensionalIt isn't, "circle" spell shapes have immeasurable height up and down. Otherwise the spell would fail to locate underground structures, which it is explicitly capable of in the description.
>>945231072/2*still fails though. The metamagic stack for the repulsion version doesn't workThe "Wight Apocalypse" version works just fine though.
>>94523081I think it makes magical sense to bind yourself in order to be immune to bindings, but yea, that's not to say that spell components aren't dumb jokes because they definitely are.
>>94523040Oh sigh. Things getting lost to the ages. Yes and no, anon.Yes the more popular and well known (and easier to build!) version is the Sorcerer build. But we were look at max damage values. You can pick up the Brd/Rng/Sor/Wiz only spell through UMD and scrolls with ACF Paladin stuff. I'd have to relook up this build but it's DMM cheese. This Paladin version notably sucks as it limits you to using it 3/day and only if you have the disposable scrolls, but it in the top 5 achievers for highest damage.
>>94523096>The "billions of damage" thing also never worked because Explosive Spell takes the shortest path to push you out of the spell, and Locate City is two-dimensional.That is a "highly debated topic"- which for the record in any real game I would agree with you about. That doesn't stop the generic internet from treating it as holy-word-works-all-the-time.If we could un-debate actually factual practical games, then I vote that Pun-pun would have never worked in the first place.
>>94523139>trying to pretend personal opinion has any value in what was clearly a demonstration of the limits of RAWAnon, I think you need to re-evaluted your understanding of past social interactions.
>>94523154>understanding of past social interactions.Anon, man, buddy, pal. If random forum posts, archived forum posts, or dredged topics on way-back-machine count as "social interactions" by people you don't know, and have never met in real life. I think you need to get out more.
>>94523107Locate city literally talk about failing to find underground cities in it's description retard.>>94523119(you)>>94523139It's not highly debated at all. Nobody has ever, anywhere, ever thought that locate city explosive spell worked. Literally not one person ever.>>94523114Only in the permissive reading where you take the area on it's word and consider it a circle, but locate city explicitly goes around things so it's hard to imagine anyone could ever be inside it's area.
>>94499625>with 4e if they hadn't changed direction.What direction did they change exactly?
>>94518516No, it's not backwards at all. When you have one encounter in a day, you can afford to cast fly, haste, freedom of movement, and mind blank on the fighter to keep him relevant against the enemies that matter.When you have eight encounters in a day, you don't prepare buff spells to waste on the fighter. Instead, you prepare the actually good spells that end encounters. The fighter can spend his actions weaving baskets and it will make no difference at all to the outcomes of encounters. Thus, many encounters in a day favors casters.
>>94520607Read my post again.
>>94521530Then they aren't limited to what's possible for a highly trained human. Like I said.
>>94522451How are you going to have action movie survival in a game with monsters who have at will blasphemy?
>>94522537Why not design a fun game instead of the illusion of one?
>>94523231There are numerous alternatives for flight while Freedom of Movement and Mind Blank are conditional rather than routine demands, and in MOST cases applying the buffs to the casting-independent DPR stick is more reliable and takes less slots than doing everything by spell on account of saving throws and SR existing.You have to take a very lengthy list of top 5% content to get the right kind of ridiculous caster for this, therefor it is not a remotely sensible expectation unless the table routinely refers to guidebooks and spreadsheets.
>>94522634If the fighter needs magic items to be relevant, why doesn't he get them as a class feature?
>>94523179>Locate city literally talk about failing to find underground cities in it's description retard.If there's no path to them. If you can't concieve of a "path" existing on anything other than a 2d plane, you need to get your head checked.
>>94523275Because everyone gets WBL. Though I don't think anyone would blink at Fighter Bonus Feats to that effect.
>>94522806Why does your game have rails?
>>94523269>After wasting 5 min to type up two whole paragraphs, which this anon summarized in 2 sentences.Yeah. What he said.
>>94523318It actually says the exact opposite of that, retard
>>94523324Because as a DM I have a finite ability to improvise, which supports a smaller possibility space than the system being run.
>>94522851No, the most powerful option you have is using Greater Planar Ally to summon a Solar, using its single guaranteed service to order it to voluntarily fail its next saving throw, and then casting Mind Rape on it to get a free, permanent ally that's a better fighter than the fighter and has spell like abilities.
>>94523323>Because everyone gets WBLThe DM decides whether or not *anyone* gets WBL
>>94523337>This spell measures the distance to the "nearest" community as the minimum distance one would have to travel to reach the city without moving through solid objects.>Thus, a caster on the surface isn't likely to locate a subterranean city half a mile beneath his feet, even if the next closest community is 5 miles away overland.It's considered unlikely for half a mile down to have a clean enough route to be five miles of path, not that it cannot function going down.
>>94523179Locate city works.
>>94523269No, Freedom of Movement and Mind Blank are mandatory against any monster dangerous enough to use spell slots on.
>>94523361Unless the players start making their own businesses, then WBL stops mattering.
>>94523323Right, but only the fighter is useless without it.
>>94523361No, the book does.
>>94523179Locate City only fails to locate underground cities if you need to pass through solid objects to reach them.If a nearby cave network gives you an unbroken path to the underground city, it should work by raw.
>>94523361Page 41:>Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level gives a guideline for about how much treasure a character of a certain level should possessPage 42:>As long as your campaign is reasonably close to the PC gear guidelines outlined in Creating PCs above 1st Level (page 199), you can use Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level to set the gear. For example, a new 13th-level character should have 110,000 gp in gear.Page 51:>Table 3–5: Treasure has been created so that if PCs face enough encounters of their own level to gain a level, they will have also gained enough treasure to keep them apace with the wealth-bylevel information found in Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level (page 135).Page 135:>The baseline campaign for the D&D game uses this “wealth by level” guideline as a basis for balance in adventures.Page 199:>Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level (page 135) shows the total value of a player character’s gear at a given level.The DMG is quite insistent upon Table 5–1 being the expectation. The DM "can" decide otherwise, but doing so is contrary to official statements about how the game is expected to work from the book they're supposed to be using.>>94523388"Dangerous enough to use spell slots on" does not entail movement-restriction or Mind-Affecting, which are all those two spells cover. Fly is unironically a better example.>>94523396No, the Barbarian, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue are also quite fucked, the Bard suffers harshly, and the Wizard becomes far narrower and obscenely fragile in operational terms due to how spellbooks work.
>>94523365Yes, which is the exact opposite of the claim that was made.>>94523412Creatures are solid objects though, and so will be outside of the area and not hit by riders like the cold damage.
>>94523451Yes, dangerous enough to use spell slots on does entail those properties. I'm obviously using fighter to stand in for any useless irrelevant class (anything that isn't a sorcerer, wizard, druid, or cleric).
>>94523468Nope, all effects are applied simultaneously when a spell resolves. They take the damage.
>>94523477Sure thing chatGPT
>>94523490Yep, you lose.
>>94523490I can't wait for the day jailbroken LLMs are advanced enough to DM a campaign without forgetting everything in minutes.
>>94523554>LLMsliterally never lolIt'll just be a more regular video game that uses a LLM to fill in fluff
>>94523470>Yes, dangerous enough to use spell slots on does entail those properties....No? They catch quite a few models of save-or-lose, but it's not like raw DPR is completely incapable of being applied through the defense stacks.
>>94523567>literally never lolYeah, technology doesn't progress. It's stayed exactly the same since humans first ecisted.
>>94523341I know people here would like to shit on Fighter all damn time, but even a marginally build fighter with ok magic items of 15th level- when you can gate in Solars. Is actually going to be fundamentally better then your summon. I'm also not going to shit on Solars and say their bad summon, They're great and very powerful, just your fighter all is going to be better.Ideally you do get both to take on your DM's BBEG.>Mind Rape + Greater Planar AllyHow are casting an exclusive Cleric 8 and a exclusive Wizard 9 spell with one character? Unless thats gained through some Domain, which makes this a cleric ability. I think you mean Gate. And why are you wasting two high level spells and a fellow player can do the same job... without wasting high level spell slots.
>>94523569Yes, it does.
>>94523592No, the fighter is not going to be better no how you build him.
>>94523592There's a feat that give wizards access to the planar ally line.
>>94523398>>94523451>Table 5–1: Character Wealth by Level gives a guideline for about how much treasure a character of a certain level should possess>guidelineIt's not a rule. It's a set of expectations and not following them is something of a red flag, but nothing prevents a DM from Monty Hauling or starving the party, just like nothing prevents a DM from consistently throwing Average Party Level+4 CR encounters that consistently net zero profits at the party. They shouldn't, but WotC doesn't have the ability to magically compel them not to.
>>94523592never heard of mystic theurge? lol
>>94523634No, it's absolute.
>>94523618Even if you pimp the fighter, he's still going to be worse than the 40HD beat-stick monster that you just dark-chaos-shuffled.
>>94523648Yeah, that's what I said.
>>94523642>never heard of mystic theurge?Anon, theurges cap at 7-8th level spells. Mind-Rape is 9th.
>>94523621Yeah... which you need to be Good aligned and a bunch of deity requirements. Which means that trick works exactly once because after you cast Mind Rape you lose the benefits of the feat. Unless you DM is handwaving alignment rules.
lol he doesn't know
>>94523648>40HD beat-stick monster23HD
>>94523658>Good aligned and a bunch of deity requirementsWhat? Which feat are you looking at?
>>94523589The problem here is that you don't know what words mean, and instead of considering that fact and improving yourself so you can try and communicate with humans you double down on being a massive fucking nigger>hurr technology improvesYou mean exactly like was outlined in the post you're replying to?
>>94523592If you're really so bad at the game that you can't figure out how to get access to high level cleric and wizard spells on the same guy, you can just gate, or a candle of invocation, or any of the other methods to get a solar.
>>94523592>Is actually going to be fundamentally better then your summonBeyond function, the fundamental problem there is opportunity cost.One of these things requires a player to dedicate their entire character to being able to hit things. The other requires casting a couple spells.>Ideally you do get both to take on your DM's BBEG.Ideally, instead of a fighter, spellcaster, and solar, you could have two spellcasters and two solars.
>>94523592Why are you wasting a player slot on a useless class when a couple spell slots (or scrolls, or wands, any of which you can craft) can do the same job... without wasting a player slot.
>>94523658You can of course replace MR with a hireling casting psychic chirurgery to avoid alignment issues. Once you have your first angel, xp and gold costs become irrelevant.
>>94523680Wow, you're completely tech illiterate aren't you? The post I replied to doesn't seem to know LLMs are being used to make games with on the fly level design as we speak. That's a little bit more than "filling in fluff".
>>94523201Ugh. Thread devolving into this guy talking about his MindRape spell again.Could I get an answer on this please? I don't care about "beating the Table top game"
>>94523691>two solarsThe wizards are really holding back.
And then of course there's Dominate Monster, which lasts one day per level, and you can order the dominated creature to fail its next saving throw and lower spell resistance when you're ready to recast. As long as you cast it again before the duration expires, you're fine.
>>94523733Shut the fuck up.
>>94523609The Venn diagram of monsters with "save or lose by immobility" and "save or lose by mind-affecting" is not a circle, and neither fully overlaps with causing Difficult Terrain that needs a Fly to deliver the Ubercharge, a (Greater) Magic Weapon to get through DR, or sundry other obstacles to the slotless Martial victory.>>94523634>They shouldn't, but WotC doesn't have the ability to magically compel them not to.And that they shouldn't means it's not a sensible expectation. The game's got hundreds of suggestions for atypical campaigns and variant rules, but discussions of "how the game works" revolves around the "stock" options layed out by the core rulebooks.>>94523691>One of these things requires a player to dedicate their entire character to being able to hit things. The other requires casting a couple spells.And the guy dedicated solely to hitting things PROPERLY lets a party mulch so many more fights than a SECOND Wizard with a Solar mind-slave that it's advantageous to overall playgroup opportunities.>>94523724LLMs are the subset that is purely textual, the fundamentals of their operations are ill-suited to DMing because it relies too much on things that aren't natural language. The neural network systems making game levels are using non-player-facing gamestate information formats, not natural language text. And I do believe a combination of Left 4 Dead's AI director and conventional algorithm procedural generation to be essential for quality control, even if their functions are passed arguments by a neural network array with an LLM front-end.>>94523740It is perfectly reasonable for a DM to respond to attempting Chain-Gate with a god smiting the asshole trying, because there are relatively few Solars and they are terribly important.
And the Solar has full Cleric spellcasting, with access to Wish, Miracle, Greater Planar Ally, and Gate, so as soon as you have one, you have an unlimited number.
>>94523752Nope, dangerous entails those properties.
>>94523752Sorry, there's nothing about deity retaliation in the book, so it doesn't happen. If you cast a spell that summons a Solar, you get a Solar. Those are the rules.
>>94523752>LLMs are the subset that is purely textualTell that to the people using them(or at least the label) for their video and art AI models.
got owned so hard he stopped replying lol
>>94523752>It is perfectly reasonableNo it isn't. Calling down the armies of heaven to help fight the BBEG that's trying to destroy/corrupt/take over the country/world is an entirely appropriate action in-universe. The god in question may impose a quest on the mortal after everythings done, for the service, but smiting them is retarded.
>>94523752If the best argument for playing a Fighter is that so the DM doesn't arbitrarily smite you for using spellcasting to its fullest, that kind of indicates how much better spellcasting is, doesn't it?
>As a consequence of basing your character around mind-breaking angels, the DM has responded by shifting the entire campaign into a hentai plotline and has decided to subject you characters to his Magical Realms.
>>94523821Just as planned.
>>94523768>Sorry, there's nothing about deity retaliation in the book, so it doesn't happenFew encounters outside modules are exactly out-of-the-book and even then few have turn-by-turn strategies for the DM's operation to be exactly out-of-the-book. The reaction of entities in the setting defaults to DM-says-so absent very specific instructions otherwise.>If you cast a spell that summons a Solar, you get a Solar. Those are the rules.And the Solar's boss is perfectly in their rights to get to smiting for taking all their generals for mind-slaving.>>94523770Dumbasses using the vocabulary wrong does not change that the meaning of the acronym is completely irrelevant to the area it's being used for.>>94523798I have other places I post and it takes time to type.>>94523802Given the context is Calling for the sole purpose of applying Mind Rape, it's very much not.>>94523814Getting the most out of spells that bring PRE-EXISTING actors resulting in their associates coming after you because "the most" entails thoroughly fucking with them is not arbitrary.
>>94523841>Given the context is Calling for the sole purpose of applying Mind Rape,Don't change the subject I was replying to the statement about what is "perfectly reasonable for a DM".It's perfectly reasonable for a God can get pissed about you raping his angels. Not so for just summoning them in the fight against evil.
>>945238732/2Not to mention, the greater context of this is on how spellcasters are overpowered compared to martials. Summoning The Armies of Heaven kinda destroys all counterargument there.
>>94523798>Has already pointed out reason why your wrong>You reply with wrong information, and no sources to back it up.More like exasperation. You talk a lot, and don't point to sources. So you're basically lying until you start posting sources.You've yet to mention Mind-Rape isn't even in the base PHB. I know people like to cris cross the two half editions but officially RAW It's technically not even valid in 3.5 being from a 3.0 book. But do go on. I'm sure we can all just take your word for it.Please feel free to reply with "Lol you bad at game" or something... followed by I assume no sources yet again.
>>94523841>Dumbasses using the vocabulary wrong does not change that the meaning of the acronymIt does.That's why the definitions of many words in the dictionary have changed recently.Language is use anon.
>>94523886>officially RAW It's technically not even validWrong. Any unupdated 3.0 is fair game by the DMG
>>94523880Yeah, we've gone from him arguing that a well-built Fighter is better than a single Solar, to trying to argue about whether a Wizard can even summon Solars in the first place. Ignoring of course that Solars aren't the only thing a Wizard could do this with. They're just one of the easiest ways to get the point across.
>>94523894>followed by I assume no sources yet again.
>>94523903https://archive.org/details/dnd_3.5_update_booklet/mode/1upDo you need me to wipe your arse as well anon?
And like that it's quiet.
>>94523929If getting sources is too hard akin to wiping your ass. You should not be post anon. Reconsider how you argue.
>>94524013Wow, you are physically incapable of admitting you're wrong aren't you?
>>94523821Sounds fun
>>94523841nope you lost lol
>>94523886everything is in the rulebook, try reading it dumb nigger
>>94523888No, meaning comes from the divine spark of God and is immutable. Sucks to suck, faggot.
>>94523886Didn't mind rape get reprinted?BoVD got officially updated to 3.5 anyway, it's as valid as a web enhancement (i.e. 100%)>>94523929That outright says that you're wrong lmao
>>94524208Then why arrn't you typing in hebrew?
>>94524223says I'm right, you mean.
>>94524405You should probably read your "source"
>>94521879Hercules is listed as one of the original inspirations for D&D martials, so go ahead and eat several bags of dicks.
>>94524223>Didn't mind rape get reprinted?No, they made a new spell called "Programmed Amnesia"
>>94522451>you're describing a dude whose punch is better than a 3rd or 4th level spellWhat I'm describing is, a character that's not limited by realism any more than other classes are, and a game that reflects that. All a Fighter would be able to with this proposed superhuman strength, are things that can be done with two hands and physical force. But he's not going to punch a fireball into being, he's not going to flex and cover a surface with grease, or teleport, or whatever. The tradeoff for this less versatile power, is being able to just DO it, at all times. No resource, no per day/encounter anything, they just are that strong/fast/tough, all the time.
>>94521879Sir Kay had basically the same powers as Ultraman though
>>94524662It's technically possible, but the rediculous bullshit of 3.5 requires stats in the triple digits for things that it really shouldn't.There needs to "epic attribute progression" for maryial link how epic skills work, with insane Dex score allowing multiple turns a round and insane Con giving things like innate Fast Healing/Regeneration.
OP here. I can see people have not in fact calmed down.>>94523733They talked about it in Designers and Dungeons. Here's a copy pasta from wikipedia>Shannon Appelcline commented that Tome of Battle was the first of two third edition books derived directly from the development of Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition, as between design phases "Mike Mearls spliced the encounter-power mechanics of 4e into this book, then into process. As such, it offers a fascinating view of fourth edition in mid-design. Though the fighters of Nine Swords have encounter powers much like they would in the next edition, their abilities had unique recharge requirements, allowing them to refill in the middle of an encounter if certain conditions were met. Before the release of 4e, Heinsoo would decide this detail was too complex and remove it."
>>94524786>Heinsoo would decide this detail was too complex and remove itFucking retard.
>>94524786It sometimes feels like there’s a game that I actually want to play lurking somewhere in the imagined space between 3.5, 4E, and 5E, but it’s never materialized.
>>94524882The playtest of 5e was unironically better than the final product.
>>94524937Who were the retarded playtesters that ruined everything?
>>94525115From my understanding they ignored the feedback and just did their own thing anyways
>>94525115I'm not even sure it was the playtesters. I remember at the time the official D&D forums being fairly positive on how Martials were handled and then the actual game released and what people did like was ripped away from all the Martials except one Fighter subclass.I blame Mike Mearls since he made several claims through out the playtest that never came to fruition too like how supposedly every class that had ever been "Core" was going to be in the PHB. He was the one to blame why Martials went back to boring basic attack all day in 4Essentials too.
>>94524662>he's not going to flex and cover a surface with greaseOK, but what if they're *really* sweaty?
>>94525318
>>94524937which playtest package? there were like 10 of them and they ranged from absolute trash to 4e to what we got in 5e.
>>94525562Most of them were better than the watered down shit we got. I thought 5e was meant to be a modular system with lots of sub systems and options. Instead it's just a generic kitchen sink game with all the sacred cows of previous editions and simplifications to let even a brain dead retard play.
>>94525562I'd need to double check the files if you want a specific citation, but I believe most people are referring to the portion of the playtest where Fighters got a pool of martial damage die each round.Which basically meant Fighters by default would have the simple unga-bunga option to just spend all the dice on damage, but could also spend those dice towards maneuvers. And while not strictly written, it also gives an easy bargaining chip to use with the DM in the context of improvised actions in combat. The playtest Sorcerer and Warlock also had some iterations that were more interesting and distinct, especially compared to the final product.
>>94525985The sorcerer that transitioned from spellcaster to actually a dragon as he used up his spells was pretty fucking cool. Probably impossible to reasonably balance across different subclasses, though.
>>94526093Well, I wouldn't exactly call the 5e Sorcerer well-balanced in its current state. And doubly so in the context of just looking at the PHB subclassses.A spellcaster with a monstrous bloodline that slowly turns more monstrous throughout the adventuring day is a fun concept, but it's definitely harder to see how it would have worked out across other creature types. Still, I would have rather them tried to do that instead of just giving Sorcerers Metamagic and a worse spell list and calling it a day.
The latter portion of this thread reminds of the last Bo9S thread I was in where the local misinformed autist was fully prepared to die on the hill that ACKSHUALLY some of the (Ex) abilities that the Swordsage had were (Su) abilities and therefore were vulnerable to various flavors of antimagic.Why does is always fucking turn out this way god damn
