BC2009: Brencrawl - Team Jiggly

[MadVlat]

...MadVlat entered the pretty, pretty pain cave knives drawn. Soon the beast reared its ugly head to the sound of a thousand points of death slicing through the air. One after another piercing the creature's scaly flesh, until soon there was no place left to damage the beast further, and it lowered itself to the ground and expired with a final great exhale...

Yeah that's what i'm talking about.

[Bitom]

I might as well chime in here. I don't really like non-WotC stuff... not really because I don't like the flavour, but because most people out there publishing don't really care about game balance... or maybe they care, but are too stupid to do anything about it... or maybe they're trying to sneak something past their own GM's I dunno.

Here's a prime example:

The skirmisher prestigue class:

Level	Ability	Bit's comment
1	adds Int bonus to AC	fine
2	ignore penalties for firing into melee, cover, ect, up to skirmisher level	OK, half level would probably be better, but ok
3	Full attack AND a move	Say what? Way to break the core mechanic!
4	Auto crit when a rogue would get sneak attack	Auto crit? what if they have a vorpal weapon? If you win init, your first enemiy instantly dies?
5	Can't be surprised, Gets a BONUS to his attacks during a surprise round	This really isn't that bad, but why do you get a bonus when someone ambuses YOU?
6	blindsight 30ft	Sure
7	2 attacks on every AoO	this would be ok if it specificly mentioned combat reflexes as determining your total number of attacks.
8	Increased base move, as well as all the benefits of uncanny dodge	This would also be ok, you're 13th level now, but it should be two seperate abilities, one of which is uncanny dodge... because unlike the text here, uncanny dodge can be beaten by a high-enough level rogue and this should be too.
9	Incresed crit range and crit multiplier when opponent is flat-footed	I'm ok with this, too... except that we auto-crit when flat-footed... so the increased crit range means nothing, and we're just multiplying damage now.
10	ALL OPPONENTS ARE FLAT-FOOTED!!!!!!	this is the game-breaker, folks. Look at how it adds with the others. And for fun, lets throw in the vorpal weapon that you can probably acquire by 15th level. Every hit is a crit, every crit is a kill. Even without a vorpal, as long as you take a weapon with a x3 crit multiplier, you're now doing 4x your strength bonus plus a wad of dice on EVERY SINGLE HIT, and all enemies always lose their dex bonus against you.

This is the kind of thing I'm fighting against. And as JP is realizing, I'm kindof a jerk about it. Feats are generally OK, as it's fairly trivial to take the IDEA of a feat and make a non-breaking version of it. Classes are harder to do so with.

Also, there are usually WotC classes with the same idea as a web class, where the play balance has been thought out by professional game designers. There are several versions of the "More wild barbarian" out there that don't defeat the core feat mechanic like Savage does. And while I haven't read curse-slinger yet, it seems to have a lot in common with a hexblade.

So as stated, we will consider non-standard stuff, but be ready for changes or outright denial. I'd like this to be a battle of tactics. I don't mind if it's a battle of character generation. But I don't want it to turn into the battle of the google search.

[jigglypuff69]

Uhhhhh.... right. We'll figure something out, kids. Our character ideas will have just have to be tweaked and stuff.

[JohnnyWeird]

Team: I don't know who else has the PHB2, but there are some interesting ideas for teamwork benefits - ways to make charges through squares occupied by allies, using spotters to reduce cover or concealment on ranged attacks, etc. - that might make our team function better as a unit. Since I don't think any of us are bringing back last year's model, do we want to try the idea of a more practiced, smooth operation?

Bit/Bren: Teamwork Benefits from the 3.5 PHB2. Okay or No-Kay?

[Bitom]

teamwork bennies = WotC published = pre-approved = otay.

[jigglypuff69]

I like the way my Sumo thinks....

[JohnnyWeird]

Rockin'. Now, what sort of skills do people have? If you can swing it, consider jump, climb, balance or spot. Let me know and I'll see what we can concoct.

There's also a benefit that offers sick bonuses if we all do the same skill check at once. I'm thinking something like that for Perform(XCrawl) for when we really have to make a splash, but it'll require someone to take Skill Focus for it. Any takers?

[jigglypuff69]

I might do it. The problem lies in this, Connie and Sean will not be able to meet with us until the end of this month. You and she have character concepts that are pretty solid, But MV, Snakeoil and myself are up in the air. I do believe MV has decided to play our Specialist with a flair for special type stuff (top secret, cannot be discussed here!) and I may be filling our Righteous Fury spot. We'll have a meeting when Connie get's back and we can pool all our sources together and belt out some fiery goodness.

[JohnnyWeird]

Sounds good to me.

[JohnnyWeird]

As a note, many of you will only need to sacrifice 2 or 3 skill points for these benefits, so don't radically redesign your characters based on this.