and Here.
The deal is this: the campaign is "Against the Giants" which has been updated to 3.5 by someone who is almost as clever as he thinks he is. So there's no way to know what you're going to face except that it'll be almost exclusively juiced-up giants.
As you'll notice, the vast majority of your fellow players are precious close to useless - which is where the min/max challenge comes in. The idea here is to make a character that can actually survive in this environment and take out enemy giants. But in order to do that, you have to fall within the restrictive guidelines of the campaign, some of which are specified explicitly, and some which are not:
- All material must be 3.5. They say this right out.
- Characters are ECL 11. Yes, not CR 11, but ECL 11.
- No Material from Settings like Eberron or Forgotten Realms. It is a Greyhawk adventure, after all.
- All builds must be Simple. There's an actual DM who has shit to do, but more importantly the entire game only lasts an hour - so no build that takes longer than a few seconds to describe will fly. Sorry, no character with 4 Prestige Classes will even be considered.
- Characters must do simple things. Again, time limit. Polymorph and magic jar take too long to resolve.
- Characters must be "Awesome". They don't have to be effective, but they do have to be "awesome". We all know that you could walk into this situation with a Wizard who has three castings of planar binding and then molest the palace with his minions - but you have to play something bullshit or they won't even let you sit down.
- It's a one-off campaign siege, but you can't use that. So no, your character can't walk in with a scroll of gate to immediately tag out with a Pit Fiend to molest all your enemies. You can't use up a pile of Candles of Invocation either. You have to pretend that it's a campaign rather than 3 ginormous battles.
With those restrictions, your task is to make a character who can stand out amongst his fellow men and whup holy hell on the giants, living to survive another day.
Now, here's the hard part: Your compatriots blow.
Seriously, you've got supposed meatshields who are guys like a Dwarven Warmind or a Kobold Fighter/Kensai. If you distract enemy giants for as much as three rounds your compatriots may not kill anyone. There is a Sorcerer in the party who knows fireball and lightning bolt. Battlefield control is not enough. You have to be offense and defense at the same time because there is absolutley no chance that the party Druid is going to do anything good like filling up a room with wall of thorns and then filling up the room with insect plague. It simply isn't going to happen. If you drop enemy giants on their ass with grease your fellow fighters are going to dish out upwards of twenty points of damage before the giants stand up again, and then those giants are going to kill your friends.
Here are some examples of things that would work:
Wererat Archer
Everybody loves wererats. You have a level of "animal" (which is bullshit) and 3 levels of LA (which is also bullshit), so you only have 7 actual class levels to play with. But that's OK, because you have DR of 10/Silver to begin with and a phat pile of Dexterity (+6 Dex, +2 Con, +2 Wisdom and Weapon Finesse for free). Now, what we're going to want is to maximize survivability, which comes from two sources: Elusive Target, and DR. DR can be jacked up by 2 per feat by throwing down Roll With It, and Elusive Target costs 3 feats which are all Fighter Feats. So we walk in there as a Ranger 2/ Fighter 4/ Dread Comando 1. Feats are: Toughness, Roll With it x3, Dodge, Mobility, Elusive Target, Iron Will (b), Weapon Finesse (b), Track (b), Rapid Shot (b).
So what does he do? He ignores Power Attack and the first 16 points of damage from each attack against him. Then he stands in the front, confident in the knowledge that his enemies can't do him more than a couple of points of damage under any circumstances. He tells his AC to go fvck itself and just plugs away with a big bow. Standing in front as an archer is counter intuitive, but as a character who is going to take an average of 5 points of damage per stone giant attack, you really can get by with some minor combat healing. Remember to wear a Chain Shirt of Heavy Fortification as it prevents enemies from performing crits that would potentially exceed DR by a substantial amount.
Phase Rogue
You start off as a halfling Rogue and use Incarnum bullshit. You're a Totemist 2/ Rogue 4/ Monk 1/Assassin 4 and you have 4 dice of Sneak Attack and 3 Soulmelds. Needless to say, we take as our Soulmelds the Threefold Mask of the Chimera, the Blink Shirt, and the Disenchanter Mask (no Chakra Bind on this one because it is dumb). At 6th level we bust out Open Least chakra in order to pop an extra Move Action out of our Threefold Mask. And of course, we bind the Blinkshirt to our Totem Chakra to be able to dimension door with a Move Action. We bust loose with Sun School, and then we teleport three times per round and make an attack after each one. But of course, our third movement each round is going to be to teleport out of close combat down the hallway.
So how do we manage to do any harm to people? Well, we have a Ring of Blink that makes all our attacks sneak attacks, and then we actually fight with castings of blade of pain and fear so that our attacks are touch attacks. We don't even use a weapon, we just use Pearls of Power. Remember that we can cast blade of pain and fear and still attack by teleporting in with a move action. If the target fails its save vs. the fear, we then make the bonus jump to another point next to it and continue to beat on the now hapless foe - otherwise we take the bonus to teleport away.
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See how this works? We don't use Midnight Metamagic to make a Persistent blade of pain and fear and then take all the Essentia and put it back into our soulmelds, because that's complicated. Instead, we leave all our Essentia in a pile and use Pearls of Power to recycle our spells because that's simple enough to explain to Mike Mearls during a lunch break.
We don't do something completely unfair like throw down a Beguiler on solid fog auto-juggle, we do something that is nearly unfair like reducing all incoming damage to the point where we can keep up with using a wand of cure light wounds between battles.
-Username17
