Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jun 14, 2016 11:04 am

In what books can I find the Educated and Divine Disciple (or was that Frank misremembering Arcane Disciple?) feats? I probably have the books, and can check them once I know what books I actually need to check, it's just there are hundreds of the bloody things.

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Tue Jun 14, 2016 11:23 am

Do you mean Education by any chance? If so,

Ghostwalk, p. 31
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, p. 34
Player's Guide to Faerûn, p. 38
Eberron Campaign Setting, p. 52

Can't find a Divine Disciple feat. Arcane Disciple is in Complete Divine, p. 79. There's a class called Divine Disciple in Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, p. 43 and more recently, in Player's Guide to Faerûn, p. 51

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jun 14, 2016 11:51 am

Thanks. I probably meant Education, yes - I was looking at an old list of "Here are twenty things that I think would work well as Feats if you had one per level".

RedstoneOrc · Post by **RedstoneOrc** » Wed Jun 15, 2016 6:57 pm

Endless question #$%b. My Google is weak wasn't there a tome feat that let anyone be a bard?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jun 16, 2016 10:46 pm

Ok, please tell me I'm not misremembering and Heighten Spell affects dice caps. They can't really have written that shitty of a metamagic feat that it only increases your DC and "you must be this tall to pass" effects, right?

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Thu Jun 16, 2016 11:02 pm

Prak wrote:Ok, please tell me I'm not misremembering and Heighten Spell affects dice caps. They can't really have written that shitty of a metamagic feat that it only increases your DC and "you must be this tall to pass" effects, right?

It does not affect dice caps.

The amazing thing is that somebody actually found a use for it. Hilarious Shadowcraft Mage hijinks ensued.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Jun 16, 2016 11:10 pm

Heighten does nothing to dice caps, since dice caps are spell specific, and the arbitrary made up dice caps for each spell don't increase with spell level. And the arbitrary table has no real rule effect on any spell.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Jun 16, 2016 11:22 pm

*sigh* damnit, Wizards.

I'm pretty sure that some book by WotC implied it did, but it's not the first time that a WotC book was written under the impression the rules worked in a way they didn't...

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Fri Jun 17, 2016 12:22 am

WotC mage books often refer to Heighten Spell as a way to "make your low level spells more powerful". They use sideways buzzwords like being "more effective" or "more reliable", but I don't think I've ever seen a blurb state that it makes fireball do "more damage". They were always careful to skirt that border.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 9:21 am

Say you'd run a d20 game within a planar city run by a trickster deity, and citizens have been abducted from all over the universe for one reason or another, and that said trickster deity is powerful and bored enough to also steal some other deities "to make things interesting in his realm" - which deities would you choose? Not limited to D&D, MtG or Warhammer or whatever are valid sources.

To not screw over divine casters I'd try and put in two or three classic adventuring deities so you can have appropriate domains and shit, but other than that I'm kinda lost as to what would make a fun, dysfunctional pantheon.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 12:58 pm

You could have the Trickster deity invite over Discord to make things really interesting, but he may also not want the competition.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 2:53 pm

Well, if you want religions, you want ...

Deists, Buddhists, Existentialists, Nihilists, Stoics, Randians, Sophists, Libertarians, Fundamentalists, Anarchists, Solipsists, Empiricists, Taoists, and Cynics.

Obviously. Gods appropriate to the same might be found by wikipedia.

Confucius, Buddha, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Zeno (of Citium), Rand, Protagoras, Belsham, Jehovah, Zhuangzi, Descartes, Locke, Laozi, and Diogenes (of Sinope).

That's not a bad set of gods, everyone likes Diogenes and he'd appreciate being one. Ironically at least. You may also like to read a little Dungeons and Discourse to get you in the mood.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:25 pm

Well, for playability's sake I wouldn't want to introduce more than 5 deities, because honestly, when was the last time you really needed more than that for an adventure?

Also, I'm very hesitant to plug real-world names like Buddha or Nietzsche into a planescape-ish d20 game.

So far I was thinking about Vecna (for all your necromancing needs), Avacyn (pre-corruption, for all your lawful goodness), and some elemental deity from the FR or Eberron or whatever.

czernebog · Post by **czernebog** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:54 pm

If you want to have some fun at religion, summoning a dozen parallel, alternate versions of the same god would be interesting. One deity's heresy is another's heroic reformation, that sort of thing. This could provide an opportunity for a pastiche religion that borrows aspects of real-life practices, without borrowing specific names whole-hog.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:11 pm

Antariuk wrote:which deities would you choose? Not limited to D&D, MtG or Warhammer or whatever are valid sources.

Sorin the vampire planeswalker. He has a lot of resources but tends to be detached so he'd have a good reason to be drawn to this planescape. Can be bargained with.

Biblical YHWH and his funky angels in all their wheeled multi headed glory. If you don't want to use a real world name just call him Demiurge. Has a stark sense of law/justice.

Kaela Mensha Khaine, maybe some combination of both the 40k and fantasy version so Eldar and Dark Elves are running about. The deity loves violence but his followers are good at subtlety.

Gork or Mork, they don't really directly interact so it's more like a space hulk full of orks crashed there and their orkiness is making things orkier. The deity loves violence, the followers love violence, it's gonna be a big party.

David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars. ???

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 5:52 pm

Prak wrote:Ok, please tell me I'm not misremembering and Heighten Spell affects dice caps. They can't really have written that shitty of a metamagic feat that it only increases your DC and "you must be this tall to pass" effects, right?

Pathfinder has that feat. Intensify Spell, +1 level, +5 dice cap; not a bad implementation surprisingly.

The whole "metamagic doesn't raise 'real' spell level" thing is pretty much premature optimization (in the programming sense). In order to close some imagined loophole, it adds complexity, creates ambiguities in several places, and even causes some much bigger loopholes like infinite spell loops. If it was just "spell level = slot level always", that would be about 1000% better.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 6:27 pm

Antariuk wrote:Well, for playability's sake I wouldn't want to introduce more than 5 deities, because honestly, when was the last time you really needed more than that for an adventure?

Okay so you're going to arbitrarily introduce the same number of deities as players to a setting where the hook is "senseless inartful disjointed horseshit"? Why the fuck are you polling us for ideas? The answer is "whatever deities each player chooses, provided they even fucking care," which means you get two gods from them and then you provide the other three by rolling dice against the wikipedia list of Discworld deities.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 6:43 pm

Ice9 wrote:
Prak wrote:Ok, please tell me I'm not misremembering and Heighten Spell affects dice caps. They can't really have written that shitty of a metamagic feat that it only increases your DC and "you must be this tall to pass" effects, right?
Pathfinder has that feat. Intensify Spell, +1 level, +5 dice cap; not a bad implementation surprisingly.

Any implementation which involves casting fireball as a 5th level spell in order to get 1d6 damage per caster level and nothing else definitely counts as a terrible implementation.

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 7:47 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Sorin the vampire planeswalker. He has a lot of resources but tends to be detached so he'd have a good reason to be drawn to this planescape. Can be bargained with.

Sounds good. If I keep Avacyn, I might even consider a pure MtG pantheon of some sorts.

OgreBattle wrote:David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars. ???

Err... that sounds more intriguing than it probably should.

Eikre wrote: Okay so you're going to arbitrarily introduce the same number of deities as players to a setting where the hook is "senseless inartful disjointed horseshit"?

I explicitly said why I am thinking of limiting the number of deities, so yeah... and how to do know what the game's hook is?

Eikre wrote:Why the fuck are you polling us for ideas?

Because people here tend to know a lot more RPG stuff than I do. If you want to rant at my premise, fine, but at least be constructive about it. Or fun. That Wikipedia line was a bit forced, to be honest.

Hiram McDaniels · Post by **Hiram McDaniels** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 8:31 pm

Which one's the d8 again? And do I roll that for attack or after I attack? Then what's the 20 sided one for???

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 1:49 am

I've heard several people (Frank included) say that the scaling feats in the Tomes were a bad idea and a design dead-end. Why exactly is that?

GnomeWorks · Post by **GnomeWorks** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:28 am

Mord wrote:I've heard several people (Frank included) say that the scaling feats in the Tomes were a bad idea and a design dead-end. Why exactly is that?

Something about people not liking the fact that taking a feat at later levels suddenly gave you a ton of things all of a sudden.

So the idea behind them was that you only had a few feats to spend, so they had to really count and make your character feel like the archetype the feat was giving you. So the feats scaled over levels.

But the flip-side of that is that then every feat you take is essentially an archetype, and since they're based on your BAB, the feats you take at later levels give you a lot of things that you weren't able to do a level before.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 3:42 am

There's also the psychological factor. As proven with Pathfinder and Shadowrun, people like the shopping list factor with each level.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 4:01 am

The Castles & Cocks thread has an argument explaining why FrankTrollman's moving away from "a few big scaling feats with big impact"

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56528& ... c&start=25

The problem with Tome Feats is not that you get a lot of them. For fuck's sake, an 8th level Barbarian or Knight only gets 3 of the fucking things. The problem is that the difference between taking the right and wrong three is very very large and it leads to a big difference between players at slightly different levels of optimization.

The direction that TOME feat discussions are moving in is "get at least one feat every level" "feat's grants you horizontal power to make you distinct from others of your class rather than raising your overall power level".

Koumei's list of feats is an example of what that looks like:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55977

Aberrant Blood: gives like five of the Aberrant Feats from Calamari Cookbook
Apprentice/Mentor
Aura of Courage: as the Paladin class feature
Aura of Fear: 30' radius, Will vs Shaken, Charisma-based
Beckon the Frozen
Broker of the Infernal
Combat Tactician: Short Haft + Stand Still + Cometary Collision + Defensive Sweep
Corpse Crafter: Crafter + Deadly Chill + Retribution + Hardened + Nimble
Craft Golem
Craft Wondrous Item
Draconic Legacy: Heritage + Skin + Resistance + Pact + Lineage
Elemental Immunity
Elemental Spell Mixture: Substitution (+0), Admixture (+4), 3 Thunders (+0), Uttercold (+0)
Evasion
Extend Spell: Extend (+1), Persistent (+6)
Fey Heritage: Heritage + Skin + Presence + Legacy + Nymph's Kiss
Fly-By Attack
Ghost Hunter: any weapon has 50% chance to hit, hear incorporeal normally, armour is Ghost Touch
Horde Breaker: Combat Reflexes + Great Cleave
Infernal Heritage: Tanar'ri or Baatezu Subtype, Resistance = HD rather than Immunity
Landlord
Mage Slayer: no defensive casting, all damage is ongoing, ignore Deflect
Magical Beast Companion (for Animal Companions or Familiars)
Magical Beast Form (for Berserkers with Bear Form, and for Wild Shapers)
Master of Manoeuvres: Improved Grapple/Grab/Trip/Disarm/Bullrush + Defensive Throw
Mounted Archery: Mounted Combat + Mounted Archery + Improved MA + Rapid Shot
Mounted Combat: Mounted Combat + Ride-By-Attack + Trample + Spirited Charge
Natural Spell
Perfect Aim: Precise Shot + Point Blank Shot + Far Shot + Rapid Reload
Perfect Two Weapon Fighting
Polyglot
Powerful Spell: Empower (+2), Maximise (+4), Explosive (+1), Intensify (+7)
Quicken Spell (+4)
Shaped Spell: Sculpt (+0), Widen (+1), Split Ray (+2), Reach (+1), Chain (+3)
Soul Eater: Devour the Soul + Craft of the Soulstealer + Essence Gourmand
Subtle Spell: Still (+0), Silent (+0), Delay (+0)
Tomb-Tainted Soul
Toxin Immunity
Universal Proficiency (all Armour, Weapons, Shields)
Weapon Finesse: can use Dex rather than Str for attacks, can use Int rather than Str for damage, does not have to use both
Whirlwind Attack
Wild Empathy
Wings
Zen Archery

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Jun 22, 2016 7:02 am

Which in turn was probably based on this post:

FrankTrollman wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:What are 20 effects you'd consider at just the right power level to be feats?

Tomb Tainted Soul

Educated

Divine Disciple

Landlord

Zen Archery

Perfect Two Weapon Fighting

Armored Mage

Aura of Courage

Ghost Hunter

Mounted Archery, Mounted Combat, and Rapid Shot

Whirlwind Attack

Craft Construct

Apprentice

Craft Wondrous Item

Precise Shot, Point Blank Shot, Far Shot, and Rapid Reload

Energy Immunity

Wings of Evil

Mounted Combat, Ride-By-Attack, Trample, and Spirited Charge

Flyby Attack

Natural Spell