Have they just run out of ideas?
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Josh_Kablack
- King
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- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
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Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
Count, Andy's been dead for quite some time so I wouldn't sweat it. If you want to come up and visit me sometime, I'll take you to the stupid tourist trap museum we built in his memory and then we can go deface the house he grew up in (which I lived next to until about a month ago)
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
Quasi-related to the running out of ideas is the fact that they have plenty of really crappy ideas. Like taking a weak-tea race like Warforged and them cutting its legs off, kicking it in its mechanical nuts and calling it a Warforged Scout.
I want to like that race, I want to so bad. I like small races. I like an androidish race. But I can't help feeling that even if it was ECL -1, I still couldn't justify taking it.
I could imagine a whole book's worth of material of just playable PC races at ECL +0. WotC has done a shitty as hell job at making any after the core books, and some of the core races suck even. If I ever had free time, that would be my pet project for an online tome akin to the nomonomicons running amok here.
What I wouldn't give for a Warforged Scout type thing that wasn't so damned pitiful. If one is going to be the most inferior race ever, at least one should get something nicer than lesser fortification. I'd rather play a pony than a warforged scout. Not an awakened pony, just a pony. A pony totally owns a warforged scout.
I want to like that race, I want to so bad. I like small races. I like an androidish race. But I can't help feeling that even if it was ECL -1, I still couldn't justify taking it.
I could imagine a whole book's worth of material of just playable PC races at ECL +0. WotC has done a shitty as hell job at making any after the core books, and some of the core races suck even. If I ever had free time, that would be my pet project for an online tome akin to the nomonomicons running amok here.
What I wouldn't give for a Warforged Scout type thing that wasn't so damned pitiful. If one is going to be the most inferior race ever, at least one should get something nicer than lesser fortification. I'd rather play a pony than a warforged scout. Not an awakened pony, just a pony. A pony totally owns a warforged scout.
Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
I like ponies.
Hey, if you have ideas, clik, then I can always come up with ways to make it an el 0 race. And Frank totally likes to pwnzor my math and make it into something actually playable.
-Crissa
Hey, if you have ideas, clik, then I can always come up with ways to make it an el 0 race. And Frank totally likes to pwnzor my math and make it into something actually playable.
-Crissa
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squirrelloid
- Master
- Posts: 191
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
clikml at [unixtime wrote:1153225892[/unixtime]]Quasi-related to the running out of ideas is the fact that they have plenty of really crappy ideas. Like taking a weak-tea race like Warforged and them cutting its legs off, kicking it in its mechanical nuts and calling it a Warforged Scout.
I want to like that race, I want to so bad. I like small races. I like an androidish race. But I can't help feeling that even if it was ECL -1, I still couldn't justify taking it.
I could imagine a whole book's worth of material of just playable PC races at ECL +0. WotC has done a shitty as hell job at making any after the core books, and some of the core races suck even. If I ever had free time, that would be my pet project for an online tome akin to the nomonomicons running amok here.
What I wouldn't give for a Warforged Scout type thing that wasn't so damned pitiful. If one is going to be the most inferior race ever, at least one should get something nicer than lesser fortification. I'd rather play a pony than a warforged scout. Not an awakened pony, just a pony. A pony totally owns a warforged scout.
You know, this sounds like a good idea. We should start a thread of LA +0 races
Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1153247375[/unixtime]]I like ponies.
Hey, if you have ideas, clik, then I can always come up with ways to make it an el 0 race. And Frank totally likes to pwnzor my math and make it into something actually playable.
I've been working almost 110 hours in the last 2 weeks and am heading off to a family vacation once I finish my nap after getting home in the morning. I'll take my lappy with me and hopefully have time to try and flesh out some of my notions for fun playable ECL zero races, hopefully having at least a couple races of each type that interests me:
* Fey (including a tiny character without flight)
* Construct
* Ooze (I had an all-ooze NPC party be rival adventurers for one campaign, that was a hoot)
* Elementals (x4)
* Plant
* Undead
* Aberration
I'm considering having interesting abilities for races be something like the scaling gained spell-like abilities of half-celestials and half-fiends, except with spells being weaker per character level. Nobody should complain much about getting 1/day spells that are 2-4 levels behind when a wizard got them.
Re: Have they just run out of ideas?
Heck, you could even do what they do in the MMIV to fill lots of pages (Except anyone can do it like 10 times, and fill up way more, quite fast). It seems like half the book is spawn of tiamat junk.
So how about we have undead plants? Let's extend that to an undead, negative energy corrupted forest sort of thing, where evil just sort of seeps out of the ground and makes everything twisted, perverse, and evil.
How about a potter plant that masters illusions and creates hallucinatory terrain or whatever to make people walk right into its mouth and eat you?
How about the tree of the damned, which is some colossal tree with vines the drag up unsuspecting animals and foliage and stuff, crush it into tiny little coccoons like fruit hanging from the tree, and turn them into horrific shamblers?
That's the next one. Shamblers are made of clumps of leaves and biological matter in a roughly humanoid form, that shamble along slowly, have oversized arms that drag on the ground, some wooden mask and bleeding eyes or whatever creepy junk, and endure such great pain and torment (like Anima) that their mournful wails do negative energy damage and cause confusion like insanity?
Then we can make some elephant grass type thing, but *evil*. It entangles you, slices you up, moves along the ground, whatever.
Then there's fey. Take some dryad, make it a really pretty undead, but all pale and kinda starting to rot, and have it have rosy blood or something. When you hit it, brittle rose petals explode out of its wound or something; fun fluff (Or maybe it does something, whatever). Casts some evil fey spells and stuff.
Of course, you can't have an evil forest without some evil treants. You could make a whole list of different kinds! Kinds with dead leaves, sorts with faces, sorts that sort of look like old, dead, normal trees, some that art tiny and some that are big. We can make some that have some crazy special interesting ability, like to splinter into 1000 little sharp pieces of wood, fly itself around with telepathy, and leave a trail of negative energy and reform itself on the other side of you. Whatever.
These things just run off the top of my head...
How about angels that look vaguely humanoid when they're at lower levels, instead of waiting to be some crazy CR to look like angels? And then we have all those high level angels at the level of solars and devas getting more sets of wings. Angels with 6 wings look cool and important, and are rampant throughout fantasy. You could run a whole section of celestials off of that. Oh, and then you could make a few more types of radiant idols for the sake of the Eberron players, or make some sort of outcast good fiend by the opposite token.
How about some little weird flavor thing, like a leave dragon? It's some diminutive dragon, and it has nests in trees or whatever. Really. And it has like, what looks like two leaves for wings, and looks kinda like a wood paraelemental dragon otherwise. Neat little thing.
Maybe you can even make it arbitrarily scary, because it's a dragon and everyone knows dragons have to be the strongest thing ever.
Then... we can do a whole ton of little guys. Little eight-legged basilisks that can scurry out from under rocks and turn things with 1 hp to stone and eat it. A hundred different little things to make it seem like you have a full magical creature ecology. That's another zillion creatures, but no one really cares because they don't really fight adventurers.
Make elementals out of weird stuff. Darkness, blood, gold, psionic manifestation, force, ether, whatever. Counts for a bunch more without any real effort, just making different sizes.
How about constructs? You can make a zillion different sorts of constructs. Just take something else, and make it construct-y. Chimera golem.
Really, if they're going for some broad group that's all for the same basic concept, like spawn of tiamat taking up half the book, they could do that for lots of things. Whole groups of monsters to spawn variations off of is easy enough to come up with, though I'd prefer they'd throw in some unique and cool stuff.
It doesn't take much to come up with a whole slew of monster ideas... either they're not trying or they've run out of ideas. I mean, when we're talking about an already low number of monsters, we're also noting that some of those entries are... drow, and such.
So how about we have undead plants? Let's extend that to an undead, negative energy corrupted forest sort of thing, where evil just sort of seeps out of the ground and makes everything twisted, perverse, and evil.
How about a potter plant that masters illusions and creates hallucinatory terrain or whatever to make people walk right into its mouth and eat you?
How about the tree of the damned, which is some colossal tree with vines the drag up unsuspecting animals and foliage and stuff, crush it into tiny little coccoons like fruit hanging from the tree, and turn them into horrific shamblers?
That's the next one. Shamblers are made of clumps of leaves and biological matter in a roughly humanoid form, that shamble along slowly, have oversized arms that drag on the ground, some wooden mask and bleeding eyes or whatever creepy junk, and endure such great pain and torment (like Anima) that their mournful wails do negative energy damage and cause confusion like insanity?
Then we can make some elephant grass type thing, but *evil*. It entangles you, slices you up, moves along the ground, whatever.
Then there's fey. Take some dryad, make it a really pretty undead, but all pale and kinda starting to rot, and have it have rosy blood or something. When you hit it, brittle rose petals explode out of its wound or something; fun fluff (Or maybe it does something, whatever). Casts some evil fey spells and stuff.
Of course, you can't have an evil forest without some evil treants. You could make a whole list of different kinds! Kinds with dead leaves, sorts with faces, sorts that sort of look like old, dead, normal trees, some that art tiny and some that are big. We can make some that have some crazy special interesting ability, like to splinter into 1000 little sharp pieces of wood, fly itself around with telepathy, and leave a trail of negative energy and reform itself on the other side of you. Whatever.
These things just run off the top of my head...
How about angels that look vaguely humanoid when they're at lower levels, instead of waiting to be some crazy CR to look like angels? And then we have all those high level angels at the level of solars and devas getting more sets of wings. Angels with 6 wings look cool and important, and are rampant throughout fantasy. You could run a whole section of celestials off of that. Oh, and then you could make a few more types of radiant idols for the sake of the Eberron players, or make some sort of outcast good fiend by the opposite token.
How about some little weird flavor thing, like a leave dragon? It's some diminutive dragon, and it has nests in trees or whatever. Really. And it has like, what looks like two leaves for wings, and looks kinda like a wood paraelemental dragon otherwise. Neat little thing.
Maybe you can even make it arbitrarily scary, because it's a dragon and everyone knows dragons have to be the strongest thing ever.
Then... we can do a whole ton of little guys. Little eight-legged basilisks that can scurry out from under rocks and turn things with 1 hp to stone and eat it. A hundred different little things to make it seem like you have a full magical creature ecology. That's another zillion creatures, but no one really cares because they don't really fight adventurers.
Make elementals out of weird stuff. Darkness, blood, gold, psionic manifestation, force, ether, whatever. Counts for a bunch more without any real effort, just making different sizes.
How about constructs? You can make a zillion different sorts of constructs. Just take something else, and make it construct-y. Chimera golem.
Really, if they're going for some broad group that's all for the same basic concept, like spawn of tiamat taking up half the book, they could do that for lots of things. Whole groups of monsters to spawn variations off of is easy enough to come up with, though I'd prefer they'd throw in some unique and cool stuff.
It doesn't take much to come up with a whole slew of monster ideas... either they're not trying or they've run out of ideas. I mean, when we're talking about an already low number of monsters, we're also noting that some of those entries are... drow, and such.