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Count Arioch the 28th
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

I asked this on 4chan first but someone immediately asked a question afterwards regarding a crossdressing princess so I'm going to assume everyone's going to shitpost about that.

In Pathfinder, Awesome Blow states that it typically deals damage equal to the creature's slam attack. The Brawler class gets powerful blow, their version deals either unarmed strike damage or whatever weapon in the "close" group the brawler is wielding. Would it be fair to say you deal damage equal to whatever weapon you're wielding if you use the feat? I'm designing a frost giant Polo team for a future encounter and my group tends to be a bit on the rules-lawyery side and I want to make sure it passes the bullshit test.
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Post by Username17 »

Awesome Blow appears to let you use whatever weapon you happen to be using. It's a Standard Action and only knocks opponents 10 feet, so it's pretty underwhelming for something that literally has "Awesome" in its name.

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Post by Schleiermacher »

So, Vampire demographics again...

The canonical "1 per 100 000" number that's nominally VtM canon gives a global vampire population of about 72 000 - obviously far too few to sustain the society described in the books, or much of any society at all above the local level, but that isn't actually a dealbreaker to me.

What I'm more concerned with is - how many vampires could actually exist and still maintain their global conspiracy of secrecy, given that they all need to feed and many of them will have ghouls, slaves, blackmail victims and other people who are aware of the vampire conspiracy to a greater or lesser degree?

As per usual much of the canon material is crazytown, so let's run with the following assumptions:

- For each actual vampire, an average of two other people are aware that vampires exist, because they are a ghoul, have been fed on and retain some awareness of what happened, are friends with one, are chained up in one's larder or whatever.

- Humans replenish blood the way they do in the real world (i.e taking about 6 weeks for a pint), but vampires only need about one pint of blood per week for basic subsistence.

- As Frank mentioned in this post, "For the masquerade to work, you don't have to get zero people to spill the beans, you have to have the media and government consensus be that those bean spillers are full of shit."
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Wed Jan 04, 2017 12:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by SlyJohnny »

I suppose it'd be like being a member of a minority or non-proselytizing religion. Not everyone would get your experience. Being a ghoul must be lonely. I imagine the "aware" people would congregate together and form communities. I can see ghouls working for poorer vampires of different clans renting places together, just to have somewhere they didn't have to watch what they said around roomies, or explain away weird routines.
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Post by Mechalich »

Schleiermacher wrote: As per usual much of the canon material is crazytown, so let's run with the following assumptions:

- For each actual vampire, an average of two other people are aware that vampires exist, because they are a ghoul, have been fed on and retain some awareness of what happened, are friends with one, are chained up in one's larder or whatever.

- Humans replenish blood the way they do in the real world (i.e taking about 6 weeks for a pint), but vampires only need about one pint of blood per week for basic subsistence.

- As Frank mentioned in this post, "For the masquerade to work, you don't have to get zero people to spill the beans, you have to have the media and government consensus be that those bean spillers are full of shit."
Well the big thing is that you need a really real commitment to maintaining the masquerade. Something like 99% of your vampire population needs to be feeding in a benign way all the time. No murder feedings, no crazed blood orgies, etc. Each vampire just takes a person home each week and delicately extracts their pint and then moves on to the next person. Maybe they cycle through a small group every few months, maybe they feed more broadly, but overall there are no big incidents. That means the 'footprint' of vampire society is kept minimal, making it much more difficult to detect and small enough so that it doesn't show up in statistical analysis.

After that then, yes, you need an active media management team to gloss over the remaining small number of incidents that do occur and to silence the cranks and investigators that put the pieces together. You also probably need a suitable cover story to cloak the operations of your vampiric community, such that they have a way to fit in with society and skim off the things they want. The obvious one is the mafia - vampires basically straight up replace senior criminal figures throughout the world and life goes on more or less as normal, the mob just accepts blood in addition to money now. organized crime already has bought politicians and media members and so on so the structural framework stays the same. Other models as possible, like a corporate one, but the mod-based one draws on feudal inspirations and seems to make the most sense for a bunch of immortals.

You also want there to be complicity by whichever agencies are most likely to be aware of vampires in preservation of the Masquerade. The oWoD actually had this: the Technocracy had mountains of proof as to the existence of vampires can probably the capability to mobilize and arm the public to wipe the Kindred off the face of the WoD, but they had other priorities. That situation was far too ridiculous, but you can posit some reason why the major investigative agencies in DOJ and DHS in the US, others in their respective nations, aren't interested in launching the anti-vampire crusades (it might be as simple as not wanting the vampiric population to launch a mass-embrace program that sends the world into a Daybreakers-style death spiral).

Also, with regards to the demographics and the population density, you can build up the social dynamics by allowing large cities to overpopulate with vampires while allowing isolates (or just ghouls) in the towns and rural areas to run blood farms (which might be as simple as doing community blood drive circuits) that they supply to the cities in return for some kind of useful compensation. That also means you can launch a blood shortage in any major city whenever you want as the GM, which is a nice hook to have available.
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Post by Chamomile »

Two people knowing for a fact vampires are real for every extant vampire is both kinda low (how rare are ghouls?) and unnecessary. So long as vampires have successfully dominated all human government and major media while also agreeing that the Masquerade most definitely needs to be a real thing (even if they are otherwise hostile), you can have 5-10% of the country believe in something and it's fine. Those numbers are small enough that anyone who believes in vampires is probably the only one in their circle of friends, who are informed by media that believing in vampires is dumb and wrong, which means vampire believers are unlikely to bring it up.

This on top of the fact that, as mentioned, people who have direct contact with vampires will probably seek out social circles where the belief is ubiquitous. If they're not vampire friendly, they will probably get spotted and taken care of before they can gain any kind of social legitimacy (something that would require both very large amounts of time and a lot of luck), and if they are vampire friendly then they aren't even trying to gain social legitimacy. Not as vampire believers, anyway.

So if it's safe to have 5% of the country believe in vampires without the Masquerade being seriously jeopardized, then you could have five people per vampire in on it, ten people per each of them who isn't in on it directly but does believe (more than the six people minimum you need for a vampire to feed without ever draining anyone, so even if every one of those people becomes a vampire believer, you still have change leftover for people who read and believe conspiracy blogs), and you're still looking at 1 vampire per one thousand people.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

There's surprisingly little integration among social groups. If you were not a goth, and it turned out that all goths were really vampires, would you have known? It seemed like 'pretend'. Most people won't jump to the conclusion that all those angsty leather/black wearing people who only go clubbing at night are all actually vampires. People KNOW but don't believe.

In our society, there are approximately 5 murders per 100,000 people. In other countries the number may be significantly higher. Vampires may enjoy a 'holiday' to a war-torn country with a collapsed civic institutions. Other victims can be explained away as a serial killer and/or copy-cat killer.

The point of the masquerade is that nothing has to change - there's just a group of people that like to pretend they're really vampires and everyone just doesn't care (and doesn't realize that they're not pretending).
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Post by Prak »

New question for my drow artificer. I was thinking about what kind of weapon she'd use, and decided I want a blaster that fires swarms of energy spiders.

Now, I could make a blaster with use activated summon swarm, and put the Elemental template on the swarms it summons using the guidelines in Planar Handbook for such (and comparing CR modification between Elemental and Entropic et al). But a swarm of Fire Spiders does not have sufficient HD to actually do fire damage. And the only "summon elemental swarm" spell I can find is Summon Elementite Swarm, which is 4th level, and the game is 6th level, so... yeah.

Are there any spells that actually summon spiders made of energy? Failing that, what's my best option to fake it?
Last edited by Prak on Thu Jan 05, 2017 9:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Emerald »

Prak wrote:Are there any spells that actually summon spiders made of energy?
Yes indeed. MoF is 3.0, so you'll probably want to update it similarly to how creeping doom (the spell it's based on) was updated, but it's a start.
Last edited by Emerald on Fri Jan 06, 2017 4:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So for D&D3.PF style game how do you balance poison out to support...

* A dedicated poisoner who has poisoned weapons and so on that can fight in combat (more like a rogue than a meatshield)

* poison does something useful/interesting but isn't fiddly bullshit to track and includes poisons immediately useful in combat

* ...but warrior guy won't demand you smear poison on his blade before every battle either

Basically a class that can buff others, but is most effective when self buffing.
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Post by Prak »

Emerald wrote:
Prak wrote:Are there any spells that actually summon spiders made of energy?
Yes indeed. MoF is 3.0, so you'll probably want to update it similarly to how creeping doom (the spell it's based on) was updated, but it's a start.
Can you tell me the spell name? Also, whether you're talking about Magic of Faerun or Monsters of Faerun?
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Post by radthemad4 »

There's a link to it in Emerald's post. It's also in Spell Compendium.
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Post by Eikre »

OgreBattle wrote:So for D&D3.PF style game how do you balance poison out to support...

* A dedicated poisoner who has poisoned weapons and so on that can fight in combat (more like a rogue than a meatshield)

* poison does something useful/interesting but isn't fiddly bullshit to track and includes poisons immediately useful in combat

* ...but warrior guy won't demand you smear poison on his blade before every battle either

Basically a class that can buff others, but is most effective when self buffing.
Dude is a rogue or something. His sneak attack damage is flavored by the poison. Certain poisons will make all his SA dice into a certain type of energy damage, or whatever. Other poisons will convert the SA dice into a bonus to the save DC of a knock-on effect.

If he takes a moment to apply the poison to his companion's weapon, the effect will still apply, but they only get a fraction of the benefit. Just one die of bonus damage, or an effect with an inconsequential save DC. Whatever.

His poisons come free but they have an expiration date and are made from exotic materials which are collected catch-as-catch-can. At the start of every [bullshitted period of time], he rolls on a table to find out which half-dozen or so poisons he's got on hand for the period.

As gimmicks go, the whole concept only carries a character about as far as using two weapons or something, so you're pretty much just looking at a feat or feature substitution, here, not a whole class.
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Post by Prak »

radthemad4 wrote:There's a link to it in Emerald's post. It's also in Spell Compendium.
Ah, I missed that.

...That's a 6th level spell. While I can make an item of it as an artificer by raw, the gentlemen's agreement that I've got to not ruffle too many feathers as an artificer is that I can only make stuff as if I mimicked a character of my artificer level +2. Summon Elementite Swarm would fly before Fire Spiders. But I might talk to the GM about modifying it a bit.
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Post by virgil »

Is there a standardized method of improving your slam attack to deal with different types of material damage reduction? Or is it houserule/commonsense territory to let a character pay for a silver gauntlet when going into the werewolf den?
Last edited by virgil on Tue Jan 10, 2017 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Eikre »

Whose slam attack? A generic monster in 3.5? Or a tomb monk?

To the first one, no, just a lot of one-off bullshit. But to the second, you should consider that the slam attack is granted to resolve all the "unarmed attacks are different, except this guy's is different again back to being the same" equivocation. Ideally, the tomb version of the monk should do everything his core analogue can manage, and one of those things is using a gauntlet to enhance his strikes.

Now, people do clutch their pearls over this notion, that a core monk can use a gauntlet. This is largely because they are stupid fuckers, and also because other stupid fuckers wrote rules for shitty amulets dedicated to putting plusses on your unarmed strikes in a wildly cost-inefficient fashion. It doesn't matter. The gauntlet weapon entry states, verbatim, "A strike with a gauntlet is otherwise considered an unarmed attack." It is there entirely for the purpose of changing the character of the damage you deal with your fists; in the base state, this is from non-lethal to lethal, but the emergent truth is that you can and should use these things to get whatever other enhancements are available to a manufactured weapon.
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Post by Red_Rob »

If you are a Tome monk and want to bypass DR, I would think you would pick the fighting style option "While Active, your Fighting Style allows your slam attacks to ignore hardness and DR".

If on the other hand you want to take advantage of weapon bonuses, you would pick the option "While Active, your Fighting Style provides any bonuses it gives to your slam attack to any attack you make with any weapon".

Thematically, if the Monk is supposed to be so in tune with their ki energy that their body is a weapon, they should really be able to use that rather than wearing a silver glove or somesuch. Luckily the Tomes were written by two people who knew the rules of 3e and can do just that.
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Post by Ice9 »

Eikre wrote:Now, people do clutch their pearls over this notion, that a core monk can use a gauntlet. This is largely because they are stupid fuckers, and also because other stupid fuckers wrote rules for shitty amulets dedicated to putting plusses on your unarmed strikes in a wildly cost-inefficient fashion.
Or maybe because "The correct fighting style is to wear a gauntlet and do all your attacking with that one hand. Monks who use a variety of punches and kicks are basically idiots" is shitty thematically. The correct mechanical fix is to use the Necklace of Natural Attacks, which is entirely reasonably priced (same as the gauntlet, basically).
Last edited by Ice9 on Wed Jan 11, 2017 12:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Eikre »

Taking thematic exception and providing a reasonable alternative is very different from the actual and common allegation, "No, monks are literally not allowed to use iron gloves at all, it is against the rules and you are bad at reading the manual. Instead please consult the DMG for the Amulet of Mighty Fists, because I consider Savage Species a 3.0 book and thus ban it from my campaign."
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Post by Eikre »

And also I thought I should mention that I looked it up and MIC has bracers that allow you to bypass DR/Silver and Magic and a ring that does the same for Adamantine.
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Post by virgil »

Presumably, when you use shrink item on an item, you can artificially extend the duration of the spell by keeping it inside an object that doesn't give room for it to return to its original size (per rules of enlarge person). Is that a correct interpretation?

In a similar vein, as bonfires do not consume their fuel while shrunk, is food similarly preserved in the shrunken state?
Last edited by virgil on Wed Jan 11, 2017 9:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by SlyJohnny »

Wouldn't the container give way, like when water freezes inside pipes? Or the item would be crushed? There's nothing that says the object stays shrunk just because it's in a small container.

The description for gloves of storing, which are created with shrink item, specifically says that items are stored "in stasis", so maybe you can keep food that way.
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Post by vezidoroga »

RAW, enlarge person gives a strength check to burst, so if the same rules apply I assume it depends on the strength of the enclosure. Maybe you could then argue your way into saying if the container holds that the material remains shrunken and unharmed. I'm not sure the same rules would apply, though, especially since reduce person doesn't have the same "can't use this for murder" text as enlarge.

As for preservation, that should work as long as you take the option of changing the item to a "clothlike" consistency.
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Post by Prak »

How in the fuck is Irresistible Dance a 6th level Bard/8th level Wiz spell? It seems like a fairly minor debugging compared to, say, Hold Person or Sleep.

I was listening to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical and thought it'd be actually fun to play a bard based on the demon from it, but when the least part of his shtick comes online at level fif-fucking-teen...
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Post by Kaelik »

Prak wrote:How in the fuck is Irresistible Dance a 6th level Bard/8th level Wiz spell? It seems like a fairly minor debugging compared to, say, Hold Person or Sleep.
Because it's no save? I mean, It's probably overvalued a bit, sure, but not having a save is usually a pretty decently cool thing for a spell that takes away all their actions for "you are dead" rounds.
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