Shapechanging Involuntarily

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Jack_Lurch
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Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Shapechanging Involuntarily

Post by Jack_Lurch »

A player wants to try out a shapechanging character, but not in the usual sense. He's looking for an Incredible Hulk type scenario. As he pitched it to me, its a regular human with levels of rogue who gains the half-fiend template when he becomes angry or takes damage.

The closest thing I can think of is the involuntary change for a lycanthrope. I don't want to take a shit all over the guy's character concept (well, actually, I do, cause I think it is retarded and comic booky), but I don't know what mechanics to apply to make it work.

Any suggestions at all?

-Jack
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fbmf
The Great Fence Builder
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Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Re: Shapechanging Involuntarily

Post by fbmf »

The way that works best, IMX, is stacking rages, including the Frenzied Berserker, Barbarian, Berserk, and have them all go off according to the FB's any damage trigger. This will make you hella strong and the Destructive Rage requirement for FB is a kewl flavor ability for a hulk-type character.

Game On,
fbmf
Username17
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Re: Shapechanging Involuntarily

Post by Username17 »

Yeah... the Half Fiend template has a number of flaws with it - most notably that you are getting "Level Allowance" (which screws up the game something awful). Furthermore, whenever you take levels in "being cursed" - the current rules for what happens when you stop being cursed are just as unfortunate as the rules for when you start.

Whenever you use the "as printed" rules for lycanthropy, you open up a can of worms that are fairly unfortunate:

Frank wrote:How to get a butt-load of PrC levels quickly

Step One: Be alive. For the purposes of this discussion, let's assume that you are 4th level, and thus have about 7,000 XP.

Step Two: Get bitten by a Were Bear. This gives you 3 levels of level adjustment, and 6 levels of animal - you still only have 7,000 XP, but you have a BAB of +8, 10 hit dice, and count as a 13th level character for many purposes.

Step Three: Lose a level. Get level drained and fail that save. You automatically lose an animal hit die.

Step Four: Cast Restoration. You now get back your level, and have the minimum amoun of XP required to be 13th level (78,000 XP). You can take this level as anything you want - so I suggest some PrC you've been lusting after (such as Frenzied Berserker).

Step Five: Cure Lycanthropy. All your level allowance goes away, but you are still a 13th level character - so you get 8 class levels in anything you qualify for - or just advance the PrC you took the first level in because the prereqs only apply for the first level.

So in five easy steps you can go from a 4th level Barbarian fighting a CR 5 encounter to a 13th level character with a normally impossible 9 levels of Frenzied Berserker without passing through any of the intermediary steps.


Note that steps one through five are repeatable, and if you happen to be a Cleric you can do it all yourself several times per day in order to boost your level to an unlimited degree.

So I strongly suggest staying away from that. All of that - there's nowehere good this can go.

But the Rage mechanic, as has been noted, works fine. Indeed, the Bear Warrior is probably your best bet here. The Frenzied Berserker is your template for Rage Induction, the Bear Warrior is your template for Rage transformation. Just try to work in something less suck for the later levels of Bear Warrior to do - and hopefully less broken for the later levels of Berserker to do. You could work it all into a single PrC, and if you rubbed enough of the serial numbers off your player would never guess that it was store bought.

-Username17
Jack_Lurch
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Re: Shapechanging Involuntarily

Post by Jack_Lurch »

Cool. I appreciate you guys helping me out with this. The rage thing seems to be what I want to do.

-Jack
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