Are we not counting Malenti?Starmaker wrote: The Dargonesti are deep elves and the Dimernesti are shoal elves. It's the same deal as with the (mountain vs hill) dwarves and surface (Silvanesti vs Qualinesti) elves: the more racist and isolated subrace is somehow nobler, purer, and more Good. (Remember: in Dragonlance, genocide is Good.)
Well, at least the sea elves don't have a third subrace.
[OSSR]Races of Eberron
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Ancient History
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I don't know, now I'm kind of tempted. The only other alternative is a new CNN program where politicians and similar are given weapons and put in a pit for a death match, which I don't think is going to happen any time soon.Insomniac wrote:They've got to say barbarian this and warrior that because hey, nobody really wants to play as Ben Bernanke in Dungeons and Dragons. He can't swing a greataxe for shit.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I don't remember any Malenti in Dragonlance, and if they do exist, they're Sahuagin anyway. Dark elfdom is more of a fall-from-grace deal (each aquatic subrace having their own dark version).Ancient History wrote:Are we not counting Malenti?Starmaker wrote: The Dargonesti are deep elves and the Dimernesti are shoal elves. It's the same deal as with the (mountain vs hill) dwarves and surface (Silvanesti vs Qualinesti) elves: the more racist and isolated subrace is somehow nobler, purer, and more Good. (Remember: in Dragonlance, genocide is Good.)
Well, at least the sea elves don't have a third subrace.
I'd be careful to include a "12 tribes" argument into the while Jews debate since there are several instances of a "13 minus 1" theme in the setting (planes, moons, dragonmarks, etc.), it's not something unique to Eberron's dwarves.
"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style." - Steven Brust
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Ancient History
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OssR: Races of Eberron
Chapter 6: Character Options
Don't ask him what the rest of the book is for in that case, he's crazy.
This chapter starts with "Racial Feats." That kinda makes me wince. No matter how you slice it, Racial feats just narrow the field of play. They're options that you're not supposed to unlock, exclusive content if you prefer. Too bad so many of them suck...
...more to the point though, the very idea of "Racial Feats" harps on one of the disadvantages of D&D3.+: overspecialization. In the player's handbook you already have metamagic feats, fighter feats, and item creation feats; the Monster Manual added Monstrous Feats; Psionics Handbook added Psionics feats...and so on and so forth. Sometimes feats even fall into multiple categories, but more often than not when creating a new book people just create a new feat - or spell, power, class, prestige class, etc.
You always hear how LucasArts or whomever decided that to keep track of all things StarWars, they built a gigantic wiki-like database which creators had access to so they could keep their dates straight. It's a good idea for sprawling, multi-author creative properties...and D&D never had that.
The D&D3.x design team.
Power creep sells books. It also makes people angry at books and drives people out of the game. It's a balancing act. Not enough power creep and people lose interest, too much power creep and... people lose interest. It's why characters gain levels in D&D.
Now the 4th edition D&D answer to this was to hand out power creep options that were simply so narrow in application that it would never add up to anything. A new power only applied to Strength/Dexterity focused Rogues who fought with rapiers or some shit. Whether it was good or not, 99% of tables wouldn't have a character who even had the option of using it. This decision was catastrophically bad and drove D&D off a cliff. And in 2005, Eberron was at the head of the pack of lemmings. The first page of chapter 6 that only applies to Elf Druids from the not-necromancer country whose animal companion is a baboon. That probably sounds like I'm making fun of this book, but I am dead fucking serious. It only applies to Elf Druids from a particular Elf country who have an animal companion that is specifically a baboon. Now what it does is to give your baboon two extra hit dice, which is kind of insane at 1st level and not even worth talking about at 4th level and up (when you have to ask why your animal companion is something shitty like a baboon and not something awesome like a dire bat). But that's not even important. The point is that a sixth of the physical space on the page is taken up by a feat that can only be selected by a character option so obscure that you've never even heard of someone considering playing a character who qualified for it.
You could play this character, but there are so many other options that you aren't going to.
This chapter is 30 pages long, 17 pages of feats and 13 pages of racial substitution levels. Racial substitution levels are character options that are nominally power neutral (they are never actually power neutral, most are a power up, some are a power down) that you are only allowed to take if you are a specific race and a specific class at a specific level. D&D 3.5 opened up in the PHB with 7 playable races and 13 playable classes and obviously the books have expanded both books tremendously. This book gives some racial substitution options to 4 expansion races and 4 expansion classes. Not all 4 expansion races get writeups in case they want to be all 4 expansion classes – and of course the expansion races and classes that get this treatment come from books which introduce other races and classes that aren't referenced. The number of race/class combinations you could potentially want to play expands quadratically as these options are added, which the racial substitution levels pick at one at a time. Even if you were only using the PHB, the Eberron setting, and the Psionics handbook, you'd be looking at like 17 playable races and 25 playable classes (this book treats the different specializations of Psion as different classes because there wasn't enough bloat already). That means that each one of these racial substitution packages provides a couple of options that a player might invoke sometime in their career for less than one quarter of one percent of the play space. Now you might say that coverage could be better than that because the options presented are there for the more thematically appropriate options, but I don't think “Changeling Egoist” is ever going to be a common character archetype in real play. That's just way too fucking obscure.
And the reality is that if you were the kind of person who would even consider owning a book like Races of Eberron, you probably owned a few books like Complete Divine and Races of Stone, and that meant that both your number of races and your number of classes was considerably larger than that. Chances are that your game had more like a thousand allowed race/class combinations. So the 16 race/class combinations are collectively just a rounding error from making no dent in things at all. And with the march of books and the inevitable race and class bloat that followed it, the chance you were ever going to be able to use any of this shit went down. You kept getting more race/class combinations, but no more of them were Kalashtar Soulknives (and thank goodness for that).
This is why we can't have nice things.
Considering how 4th edition D&D structured itself to be basically like this all the time, I think the people actually writing this crap thought they had figured out a perfect system. Content could be generated procedurally in a hurry, but it would never ever “fill up” because the act of making new content also multiplied the amount of content to make. 4th edition's 12,000 word classes that could be written in a day was simply a more refined version of this. And if your life goal is to write D&D material and be paid by the word and never ever stop doing it, this sort of Achilles racing the Tortoise system probably sounds frickin awesome. However, for people who actually wanted to play this fucking game, it was shit. This chapter is 30 pages long and filled beginning to end with “options,” but there is a very real chance that zero of these options are in any way applicable to any character you've ever played or any character anyone you've ever known has ever played.
A lot of these feats use Eberron-specific mechanics, like Action Points or the double-scimitar. In fact, as far as prerequisites go, you could be forgiven for not understanding the difference between the racial feats and the general feats. Yes, it's all well and good to claim that racial feats require you to be an elf or something, but a lot of the general feats are about as useful and specific. Seriously, who the fuck is going to have proficiency in a Talenta or Xen'drik boomerang except a Talenta halfling or Xen'drik drow?
Elf power! Now, if I make these ghoststrike blades, I'll look like Darth Maul..
Very rarely, however, they fuck up and let a feat through which is marginally useful. For example, Daylight Adaptation is a racial feat for nocturnal classes so they're not blinded by bright light. That covers everything from Drow to...er...other light-challenged races.
On the other hand, Dinosaur Wrangler is restricted to Halflings from the Talenta Plains with at least 1 rank in Handle Animal, and that's just bad. Because honestly, maybe somebody else wants to learn how to wrangle dinosaurs.
This link answers your next, obvious question.
Master Linguist is the kind of feat which is weird to me. If you know four languages, you can take this feat and learn a new language automatically at every level. That's not terrible - but it's still a bit shit, isn't it? Speak Language gives you a new language for every point in it, and that's capped by your level. Do you really want a feat which is the equivalent of giving your one more skill point per level? Mechanically, it's bad - you should probably have spent that feat on something that will let you face level-appropriate challenges. (And then of course there's Polyglot, but let's be honest, if you're breaking out that book then the warm liquid hitting your shin is not rain). So it's a decent fluff feat, but not a great mechanical feat.
Mutable Body for Shapechangers is again something that probably should have been a monstrous feat...y'know what, I don't care. It allows characters with the shapeshifter type (i.e. Changelings) to add +1 caster level to any Transmutation spell cast on them, which is probably inadequate. But then it says, if you're using the Action Points mechanic, you can blow 2AP to automatically make any transmutation spell on you extended or empowered. Pretty great for buffs, so long as you know what you're getting. Empowered eagle's splendor might not quite be Book of Erotic Fantasy territory, but +6 Cha isn't bad. Hell, with the right feats you can pull that off at 1st level.
Changelings get a lot of stuff like that in this section; Persona Immersion lets you detect any divination spell or telepathic psionic power of 3rd level or lower and supply false information - which basically means that it completely negates every ability the Mindspy has. Racial Emulation lets the shapechanger emulate all of a race's subtypes (like, Elf, Goblinoid, Fire, Extraplanar...I don't think this was thought out very well) for purposes of using magic items and crap. Which is fun, and flavorful, and probably broken, although I have no idea what happens if they try to banish you when you're emulating a non-native outsider or something. Presumably you get a quick one-way vacation to an Outer Plane of your choice. I'm sure there's someone out that that claims this would let the Changelings take basically any racial feat too, but...seriously, you want to burn a feat so you can burn another feat that you can only use while looking like an elf?
Path of Shadows is a Kalashtar feat requiring you to be a Kalashtar and take 5 ranks in Perform(dance). Not because of the strong Kalashtar bardic tradition or anything, but because somebody - I don't know who - had this hard-on for Kalashtars and dancing. I'm pretty sure there's like another feat and a prestige class somewhere about Kalashtars and dancing. It's very strange.
Behold, the might of the Kalashtar flamenco!
Some of these feats, I think people just weren't talking to each other. Soulblade Warrior is a racial feat for Kalashtar soulknives, which lets them manifest the mindblade as a swift action and increases their effective Soulknife level by 2 for purposes of mindblade enhancement (which doesn't come online until Level 6 anyway). It also lets you add your AP roll to damage whenever you burn an action point on a mindblade attack roll. It's very clearly intended to make everyone else feel small in the pants if they aren't a Kalashtar soulknife, no matter how much that class sucks...but why the fuck isn't it a psionic feat?
Feats in 3rd edition exist in a weird place. Originally they were set up as little pieces of character specialization – a thing that you took outside the normal leveling progression that would make one Ranger with an 18 strength different from another. But little questions like how good they should be or how thoroughly they should define your character were vague from the start. Five years into 3rd edition, these various different directional pulls on feats had basically killed the project, but people kept writing more of them. A normal character would, over the course of 20 levels of play, get seven feats. In your first 8 levels (the usual end of a real world campaign), you'd only see three. But with so many cooks making feats to try to do different things in every fucking book, there were literally thousands of feats. That's not even a joke, there were more than one pile of a thousand feats to choose from, and you would likely only ever see three of them in your character's lifetime. Not three thousand or three hundred, just literally the number three. The thing that comes after two. Needless to say, the wheat to chaff ratio of those feats was so terribad that there are probably books with dozens of feats in them where no live human has ever willingly selected any of those feats for their character in a real game.
No matter how many feats got printed, the number of feats your character actually got to have didn't rise.
So let's talk a bit on some of the ways feats were used.
Hot Patches. Sometimes a rule doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and even more often a rule doesn't work the way one of the authors wants it to. When this happens, an author can make a feat that changes that rule to work the way they want it to. If there is general agreement that that is how things should work, that feat becomes mandatory. In D&D parlance, that is called a “feat tax.” Examples of feat taxes are things like Tomb Tainted Soul, Zen Archery, and Educated. Tomb Tainted Soul is a feat that makes your character healed (instead of hurt) by necromantic energy instead of normal healing magic. This is absolutely fucking vital for Dread Necromancer characters, whose primary class feature is that they can fill the area they are standing in with necromantic energy. If you take Tomb Tainted Soul you are able to heal yourself at will, and if don't then when you use your energy burst power you kill yourself. It's not even a choice, all Dread Necromancers are required by law to take Tomb Tainted Soul and as a result all Dread Necromancers get one less selectable feat. So in any game starting below 9th level, they only get 2 feats to actually play with. Zen Archery is a feat that lets you use your Wisdom to shoot arrows, so if you want to play an archery shrine maiden you have to spend a feat on that. Educated puts knowledge skills on your skill list, so if you want to play a ____ scholar, where ____ is something like a warrior or assassin that doesn't have the knowledge skills you want on the class skill list, you have to spend a feat on it. There are hundreds of these fucking things, which are supposed to allow character options that clearly one of the authors thinks the rules should have supported from the beginning. Some of them don't even work, like the feat that lets you combine your Swashbuckler and Monk levels for purposes of calculating some abilities – but even those are clearly attempts to patch the game into allowing a character concept currently denied.
Make It A Feat. Roleplaying games are inherently open ended. Sometimes you want to do a thing that the game doesn't already have explicit rules for. When people write rules for ad hoc stunting they almost always talk about swinging on chandeliers. Which is weird, because it's a thing that comes up often enough that you'd think there would be a basic rule for it. Even if you did codify that one into the rules, there's still going to be an unlimited number of situations where someone is going to want to do something acrobatic and/or heroic. Maybe sled down a mountain on a shield or literally pull on a rug that a bunch of guards are standing on. But regardless, one of the things people keep doing is to make feats (game term meaning limited quantity selectable character ability) that codify these feats (natural language term meaning an impressive or noteworthy action). And what that does is shrink the play space. If I have to spend one of the seven feats I will ever get even if the game goes on for the rest of my natural life on being able to grab someone's weapon and stab them with it, that essentially stops being a stunt I will ever be able to do. And the flipside of course is that if that is one of the feats I took, I'm gonna use it all the fucking time. And it's worse even than that, because authors would split those actions up into little bits. And I mean little bits. That weapon snatching trick I talked about earlier is actually the result of four feats (Improved Unarmed Strike, Combat Expertise, Improved Disarm, and Snatch Weapon). So to do that at all you pretty much have to find a source of bonus feats, and your character is still the guy who just spams the same stunt over and over again until you lose interest in the character and the game.
Bullshit Bonuses. +1 to this, +2 to that. If you can't think of a thing for a feat to do, you can always fill page space by picking a number in the game and writing a feat that adds to it, either all the time or in certain situations. Sometimes these number bonuses end up being very important, pushing something crucially from non-viable to viable or bad to good or something. The community calls those feats “math fix feats” and treats them like a feat tax. Indeed, Zen Archery described above is also a bullshit bonus feat in addition to being a hot patch. But most of these are just wastes of space. I don't know if the authors of this book thought you were going to spend one of the handful of feats you were ever going to see on getting a +1 to attack rolls and armor class while on a ship, but obviously you are not going to do that. I can't even tell if this was being offered sarcastically, because tone of voice doesn't carry in the printed word. It's gone on record that Heinsoo and Tweet really have written bullshit bonus feats as attempts at sarcasm, but some others have been offered seriously and it's really impossible to tell just by reading the shitty feats in question.
There are ways to get more feats - if your Mister Cavern has a well-lubricated prick and a copy of Unearthed Arcana, you can pick up some character flaws at first level for some bonus feats, and many classes - like the Fighter and Wizard - have bonus feats as well. If you multiclass very carefully you can probably pick up a new feat or two at every level - but you're still not going to get multi-feat chains.
All of the Psionic feats in this section are also Kalashtar racial feats. That's not even a joke, it's just sad. My favorite is probably Shield of Thought, which lets a soulknife turn their mindblade into a mindshield. That's slightly less silly than it sounds, for a couple reasons. One, it immediately opens up all shield bash feats and tactics - which, okay, Soulknife is a shitty class anyway, but it's perfect for a low-level one-off or recurring NPC. I like to play my overspecialized Psionic NPCs as comic book supervillains - "Once more, you have incurred the wrath of The Shield!" - that sort of thing. You can also split a mindblade at 5th level, so it's possible to do psionic sword-and-shield fighting - again, not terrible for an NPC who is going to die horribly.
I shield well.
Shifters get "Shifter feats." Why aren't these just Racial feats? Because the more you take, the more times you can use your shining Shift power. They did that in Lords of Madness too, with Aberrant feats (which, hilariously, became kinda fun in Eberron because there was an optional rule where Aberrant Dragonmark characters could count those too.) Anyway, Shifter feats are almost universally crap - the one that tends to draw attention is Shifter Ferocity, which increases the damage dealt by your natural weapons by two steps while raging and shifting simultaneously ("two steps" makes me think this owes more to Earthdawn than not, but it might be a coincidence). This is one of those things where a one-step move is pretty easy to obtain from a bunch of different sources, and they all stack, so that if you are a shifter and if your burn your feats and get the right classes, you might be able to do as much damage as a wizard of the same level with a fireball. Not like, a mazimixed or empowered fireball, and not to as many people, but that's what you get for trying to be Sabertooth.
The shittier, blonder Wolverine.
Tactical Feats...I'll let Frank rant about these.
One attempt that D&D made to deal with the problem of people not getting enough feats was Tactical Feats. Rather than being one trick, they were like three or four. They still had a list of prereqs as long as your arm, but they gave you a list of abilities that could be used in various circumstances. This sometimes made you less of a one trick pony by giving you a list of things to do in different circumstances. Of course, sometimes we ended up with Tactical Feats where the three or four modifiers just synergized or only one was worth using and you still ended up being a one trick pony. That happened both with tactical feats that you used (like Shock Trooper or Elusive Target) and with ones that you didn't (like fucking Giantbane or Raptor School, which suck sweaty sweaty balls). But the bottom line is that by having 3 or 4 different maneuvers in one feat, you ended up with something that was much much more likely to make the cut than those 1/3 of a maneuver make it a feat feats described earlier. Tactical Feats have the highest ratio of “feats you might actually use” to “total feats written” of any category of feat. By a huge margin.
Now this is a book about Races of Eberron. It says that right on the cover of the book. That means that the authors felt pressed to make tactical feats for specific races. And it means that the authors chose the obscure Eberron-specific races to make feats for. So even if the tactical feats were good, they'd still be too specific to ever see play. Kalashtar Thoughtshifter is a tactical feat that you can only take if you are a Kalashtar Soulknife. You... are not... one of those... things. Now what it actually does is give you access to three separate things you can do to spend a power point to gain an inconsequential bonus if you've been futilely attacking the same target for several rounds. So it's not good. It's not even passable. If this ability was given out freely to all soulknives, they probably wouldn't use it. And that's if people played soulknives, which they don't. If you gave this for free to classes that have power points that players actually play (like Psionic Warriors), people still probably wouldn't use it. It's just dumb.
But because of all the formatting and shoveltext, Kalashtar Thoughtshifter uses up about a third of a page.
Battleshifter Training is a tactical feat and a racial feat, but not a shifter feat. Because fuck you. It also is one of those rare feats which doesn't let you have another feat, in this case Ragewild Fighting. I don't know why, they don't stack or anything.
Dancing with Shadows is a Kalashtar flamenco tactical feat. See, I told you! And there are more! I'm just too lazy to go find them. I bet somebody had a psionic dervish class planned.
The biggest problem with Tactical Feats is that they're most good at very low levels, but the prerequisites are such that you can't really get them until you're mid-level, at which point the game has begun to break down mechanically.
One of the ways this book uses up space is to have special feats to represent powers that some of the races probably should have had. So there are Shifter Feats that only Shifters can take and they improve their lyncanthropic change. If you spend enough feats on this shit, you can even be a passable werewolf. Of course, as previously mentioned, you don't actually get that many feats to spend, so this was a doomed design paradigm before it even started. The Warforged get the same deal. If you want to be a robot man with extending arms or a crushing jaw, you can do that – but you gotta spend feats. Again and still: 3.5 D&D does not give you enough feats to do that.
Lots of players want a character something like this, but they can't have it because that's more feats than you ever get. Also go fuck yourself.
Warforged feats are strange, and I'm going to go back for a second and talk about something we missed about warforged. See, as living constructs, warforged come built-in with armor...which can explicitly be enchanted with the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat. Which is honestly not a bad deal; a warforged can have themselves enchanted as Armor of Undead Controlling and make the party Necromancer feel small in the pants. But then you get Warforged feats which specifically change the composition of a warforged's anatomy and...I don't know how those are supposed to interact. I guess they stack? When they can? How does that work with the Unarmored Body feat? I don't know. It doesn't explicitly say.
Some of these also make certain warforged class combinations impossible. For example, a Warforged Druid who takes Mithral Body or Adamantine Body at first level "cannot cast any Druid spells or use any of the druid's supernatural or spell-like class features." Well, thanks. That's fucking useless, now isn't it?
Yeah, I got the Plate Armor of the Deep upgrade. I can talk to the fishes, now.
Racial Substitution Levels were, as previously described, never ever going to meaningfully fill the play space. But they were going to fill page space. Yes indeed! The Changeling Wizard option is just that if you want to specialize in Illusion or Transmutation you can increase the cost by 50% and apply your specialization bonuses to both schools. It's... a moderately OK deal and you might be tempted to do that. But explaining this extremely simple concept takes an entire page. Holy shit. And note: this isn't even a thing that applies to all changeling Wizards, just Changeling Wizards who want to specialize in Transmutation or Illusion and not ban-school the other one.
Changeling Egoist annoys me. It has "Body Control (Ex)", which is basically just a shittier version of the Mutable Body feat, except for Psychometabolism instead of Transmutation spells - and yet it costs you your bonus feat. Who does that? Why? Just make Mutable Body work for Transmutation and Psychometabolism and then give it to them as a bonus feat!
8th level Changelings rogues get to do a Mystique kind of thing where they shift their internal organs around so that people only have a 50% chance of stabbing them in the kidney with a sneak attack or critical hit. Which is fine. Then it goes to crazy town:
Aside from the dual specialization nonsense that Frank mentioned, at 5th level Changeling wizards get the Morphic Familiar option - which is potentially awesome, although it would be more potentially awesome at a much lower level. Basically, this ability lets you turn your familiar into any other familiar you're allowed to have. So your crow familiar can fly to the castle, turn into a snake to crawl through a crack in the wall, turn into a cat to get past the booby trapped hallway, and then turn into an octopus and strangle the fucker as he sleeps in his bed. And that's just normal familiars; imagine the fun you can have with the Improved Familiar table! Eyeball Beholder, I chose you!
At some point, somebody decided that what they really wanted was two shitty flavors to go together - and so they decided to encourage people that Kalashtar want to dual-class as monk/soulknives. You don't get the full appreciation for that here, except that Kalashtar have racial substitution levels for both monk and soulknife, but buried somewhere is a feat where you can use flurry of blows with your mindblade and shit. Which would almost make them useful...no, I tell a lie.
Shifter druids can get a "beast spirit," which is not a spirit in the traditional sense because shup-up and requires a 3/4 page sidebar to explain all the bullshit small powers it gives you. Shifter rangers can share some of their shifting with their animal companion, which is a misdemeanor in Florida and Georgia. A shifter wilder...uh...why the fuck was Wilder a class, again? Also, why don't they have shifter barbarian, if they were going to fap that hard to it?
Warforged Artificer seems like a natural fit, but is just confusing. As mentioned previously, warforged can enchant themselves as suits of armor, so they can also basically imbue themselves...and they get the Tools of War ability, which lets them repair damage when imbuing...so can the heal themselves, or not?
My robot brain demands beer.
Fighters don't get nice things. So when you have a Fighter racial substitution level, you shouldn't take away the nice things they have - their bonus feats - and replace them with other, shittier things. And yet, there is the Warforged Fighter racial substitution levels.
There is a warforged paladin. As much fun as it might be to champion the cause of the Machine God, I don't think you're going to want to play one. Although I did once work on an NPC that was a warforged paladin who enchanted himself with armor from the Book of Exalted Deeds - I was determined to get some use out of the BoED - but sadly, the PCs never went down the path that led to him, and he rusts forgotten in the bowels of my campaign notes. Fair-thee-well, Fidelis.
Chapter 7: Prestige Classes
Eventually, parties end up looking like The Village People or the Justice League.
This chapter is 38 pages long and provides eight character options. Seriously. Eight. Not eight per page, not eight per race, not eight per class. Just eight. Total. This is the lowest information density this book gets, which considering how much we complain about low information density in this book is rather an impressive feat in and of itself.
Prestige Classes were originally brought in at the beginning of 3rd edition as a way to reconcile people being in a class based game and wanting to have their character get transformational advancement at some point. When you get into the mid-levels, you stop being a “Fighter” or a “Wizard” and start being a “Storm Lord” or a “Witch Queen” or something. Your class gets a cooler name and you get personalized and directionalized
development. This sort of mid-life character differentiation appeals to a lot of people. It ties in to how a lot of fiction goes, with characters becoming more distinctive and specific as their legend grows.
Not just any random dude in a hood.
As originally conceived, the prestige classes were examples. Your character stole the Eye of Misfortune and now you and your DM put together a Luck Stealer prestige class for your Rogue to jump into. The play space was limitless. Which is of course why it didn't really work out. Most people didn't want to write their own classes and most people wouldn't let you use homebrewed prestige classes anyway. They wanted “official” prestige classes. And even though each and every prestige class was basically an Elothar, they still wanted them to be from books with logos on them. What this meant was that the demand for Prestige Classes was exponentially large. You couldn't fill that play space. Everything you wrote and threw into that play space would achieve terminal velocity and drift out of reach of your light source long before hitting the bottom. Actually filling that playspace was prima facia absurd.
So WotC found that they could take 30-40 pages of prestige classes and put them in a book and people would thank them. It didn't make a dent in the play space, but it gave people officially printed things for their characters to do. And it created a very weird culture of “builds.” See, Prestige Classes were keyed to be stepping off points for people who had finished a character arc and wanted to step off into a new direction. So they were filled up with requirements. Must have a certain skill, must have completed the adventure you just did where you fought the Ogre Baron, must be named Elothar, and so on and so on. So when people started treating the specific ones that were printed as the specific ones they had to get into, they began warping their character growth and adventuring choices to fit the published Prestige Classes – rather than the original intention of writing new Prestige Classes to fit the characters and adventures they had. Kind of a tragedy really, and charop “build culture” is and was extremely stupid.
So anyway, somewhere along the way, WotC authors stopped treating the 30-40 pages of PrCs mandate as a way to generate lots and lots of content that players were going to want to read but probably not use, and started treating it as a rote exercise. There were simply a number of pages to fill with PrCs in each book, so the challenge was simply how to get each prestige class to fill up as many pages as possible. This leads to almost unbelievable and wholly pointless page bloat. Each Prestige Class in this book takes nearly five fucking pages, and is still just a single dude's character arc. Good or bad, we're still spending five pages talking about if you were a Changeling and you spent some time working for Doppelgangers, you could pick up some extra Doppelganger powers (that's the Cabinet Trickster). That's a concept that's maybe worth discussing in five paragraphs, not five pages.
Prestige classes also had the advantage in that they didn't require you trying to fill out twenty character levels, so they tended to be condensed compared to the base classes, especially Fighter and Sorcerer, which have a lot of "blank space." You could have prestige classes that were only 3, 5, or 10 levels - I don't know why they settled on those, because seriously, there were some prestige classes which were still mostly filler. Prestige classes answered needs that players didn't know they had - the for other abilities beyond the standard 12 core classes.
Frank touched on this when he was talking about the playspace, but every RPG has to run a fine line between how many options they give the players in relation to how much they've written for the game. One of the reasons AD&D was such a sprawling fucking mess is that it crawled up its own ass; despite efforts like the Encyclopedia Magica and the Spell Compendiums, the rules were just too spread out to be adequately managed - you ended up with a lot of duplication, a lot of limp-dick spells and effects, rules with special cases, and all in all a much more complicated game than anyone could play. Eventually, WotC brought out a new edition specifically to answer that problem - streamlined, organized classes. Common spells and effects to refer to. The joy of early D&D 3 was in the restructuring, and the innovation in taking what was a vast and unwieldy set of rules and boiling it down and organizing it so you could use it again.
Then, of course, they fucked it all up by making the same mistakes again.
The eight PrCs given in this book are:
Well, take a look at the entries. "Becoming ___", "Class Features," "Entry Requirements," Table, "Playing An ___", "Combat", "Advancement", "Resources", "____ in the World", "Organization", "NPC Reaction", "____ Lore", "____ in the Game", sample NPC/encounter...you don't need any of that except "Class Features," "Entry Requirements," and Table, and those are in the wrong fucking order.
Beyond what Frank said, some notes on the classes.
"Atavist" is called that because they're supposed to be a throwback to the quori spirit that birthed them or some shit; what they actually are is a prestige class designed for Kalashtar monks, soulknives, or monk/soulknives. You're never going to play one, because there's no big payoff.
Cabinet Trickster is basically the class that qualifies you for Mindspy. If you're a changeling with Cabinet Trickster and Mindspy, you're basically a Doppelganger for all purposes that matter.
You don't have to be a Druid to be a Moonspeaker, but you're never going to be a Shifter Paladin, are you? Might work for a Shifter Ranger, and I'd bet money that's what it was intended for.
Quori Nightmare is what it says on the tin - fear powers. Despite the name, it doesn't really interact or mesh with the Plane of Dreams or any other dream, sleep, or fear-causing/related power or ability in any way. I guess that one class from Heroes of Horror would mesh with it.
Reachrunner is about running. If you doubled this up with some of the Shifter feats, you end up with a character that can run very far, very fast, and still lose to a teleporting wizard or a druid who wildshapes into a cheetah.
Recaster is a much lower-level and shittier version of some of the aspects of the Archmage prestige class that people liked. The thing is that as you go up in level people like the ability to muck about with how their spells operate - cast fast, last longer, change the shape to suit the battlefield, switch out fire for ice...
...which is basically why metamagic feats are a thing. Recaster does that too. Just, y'know, crappier. And limited to a couple times a day.
Reforged, as Frank mentioned, is a 3-level prestige class about becoming something other than a warforged. The mechanics are double-plus ungood, in that they're so poorly worded it's unclear if the stated effects are what the writer intended to arrive at. Unlike some classes which top out with you becoming a dragon or a fire elemental or something, in this one you end up being a...I'm not sure. I mean, you're still technically a warforged, but you lose a lot of warforged traits, and gain some non-warforged traits, but you're still a warforged. It's confusing.
Spellcarved Soldier is especially weird because, as mentioned, as a warforged you can totally enchant your native armor. Also, I'm just going to point out something:
Prestige Classes were ultimately a failed experiment. There were a lot of things about them that people loved, but it never worked properly and was never going to work properly. By 2005, WotC was going through only the barest of motions in pretending to try. The proforma had gotten so bloated that it was just an exercise in wasting wordcount.
You might think we're ranting pretty hard for a book that might as well be called Special Snowflakes of Eberron, but that's sort of the point. This book reads like Special Needs of Eberron, the Shortbus edition, where even the characters that they try desperately to get you to care about are at best only "meh," and the book has been hit so hard by the balance stick that there's nothing even worth porting to your home campaign.
Next up: More crunch!
Chapter 6: Character Options
Don't ask him what the rest of the book is for in that case, he's crazy.
AncientH:
This chapter starts with "Racial Feats." That kinda makes me wince. No matter how you slice it, Racial feats just narrow the field of play. They're options that you're not supposed to unlock, exclusive content if you prefer. Too bad so many of them suck...
...more to the point though, the very idea of "Racial Feats" harps on one of the disadvantages of D&D3.+: overspecialization. In the player's handbook you already have metamagic feats, fighter feats, and item creation feats; the Monster Manual added Monstrous Feats; Psionics Handbook added Psionics feats...and so on and so forth. Sometimes feats even fall into multiple categories, but more often than not when creating a new book people just create a new feat - or spell, power, class, prestige class, etc.
You always hear how LucasArts or whomever decided that to keep track of all things StarWars, they built a gigantic wiki-like database which creators had access to so they could keep their dates straight. It's a good idea for sprawling, multi-author creative properties...and D&D never had that.
The D&D3.x design team.
FrankT:
Power creep sells books. It also makes people angry at books and drives people out of the game. It's a balancing act. Not enough power creep and people lose interest, too much power creep and... people lose interest. It's why characters gain levels in D&D.
Now the 4th edition D&D answer to this was to hand out power creep options that were simply so narrow in application that it would never add up to anything. A new power only applied to Strength/Dexterity focused Rogues who fought with rapiers or some shit. Whether it was good or not, 99% of tables wouldn't have a character who even had the option of using it. This decision was catastrophically bad and drove D&D off a cliff. And in 2005, Eberron was at the head of the pack of lemmings. The first page of chapter 6 that only applies to Elf Druids from the not-necromancer country whose animal companion is a baboon. That probably sounds like I'm making fun of this book, but I am dead fucking serious. It only applies to Elf Druids from a particular Elf country who have an animal companion that is specifically a baboon. Now what it does is to give your baboon two extra hit dice, which is kind of insane at 1st level and not even worth talking about at 4th level and up (when you have to ask why your animal companion is something shitty like a baboon and not something awesome like a dire bat). But that's not even important. The point is that a sixth of the physical space on the page is taken up by a feat that can only be selected by a character option so obscure that you've never even heard of someone considering playing a character who qualified for it.
You could play this character, but there are so many other options that you aren't going to.
This chapter is 30 pages long, 17 pages of feats and 13 pages of racial substitution levels. Racial substitution levels are character options that are nominally power neutral (they are never actually power neutral, most are a power up, some are a power down) that you are only allowed to take if you are a specific race and a specific class at a specific level. D&D 3.5 opened up in the PHB with 7 playable races and 13 playable classes and obviously the books have expanded both books tremendously. This book gives some racial substitution options to 4 expansion races and 4 expansion classes. Not all 4 expansion races get writeups in case they want to be all 4 expansion classes – and of course the expansion races and classes that get this treatment come from books which introduce other races and classes that aren't referenced. The number of race/class combinations you could potentially want to play expands quadratically as these options are added, which the racial substitution levels pick at one at a time. Even if you were only using the PHB, the Eberron setting, and the Psionics handbook, you'd be looking at like 17 playable races and 25 playable classes (this book treats the different specializations of Psion as different classes because there wasn't enough bloat already). That means that each one of these racial substitution packages provides a couple of options that a player might invoke sometime in their career for less than one quarter of one percent of the play space. Now you might say that coverage could be better than that because the options presented are there for the more thematically appropriate options, but I don't think “Changeling Egoist” is ever going to be a common character archetype in real play. That's just way too fucking obscure.
And the reality is that if you were the kind of person who would even consider owning a book like Races of Eberron, you probably owned a few books like Complete Divine and Races of Stone, and that meant that both your number of races and your number of classes was considerably larger than that. Chances are that your game had more like a thousand allowed race/class combinations. So the 16 race/class combinations are collectively just a rounding error from making no dent in things at all. And with the march of books and the inevitable race and class bloat that followed it, the chance you were ever going to be able to use any of this shit went down. You kept getting more race/class combinations, but no more of them were Kalashtar Soulknives (and thank goodness for that).
This is why we can't have nice things.
Considering how 4th edition D&D structured itself to be basically like this all the time, I think the people actually writing this crap thought they had figured out a perfect system. Content could be generated procedurally in a hurry, but it would never ever “fill up” because the act of making new content also multiplied the amount of content to make. 4th edition's 12,000 word classes that could be written in a day was simply a more refined version of this. And if your life goal is to write D&D material and be paid by the word and never ever stop doing it, this sort of Achilles racing the Tortoise system probably sounds frickin awesome. However, for people who actually wanted to play this fucking game, it was shit. This chapter is 30 pages long and filled beginning to end with “options,” but there is a very real chance that zero of these options are in any way applicable to any character you've ever played or any character anyone you've ever known has ever played.
AncientH:
A lot of these feats use Eberron-specific mechanics, like Action Points or the double-scimitar. In fact, as far as prerequisites go, you could be forgiven for not understanding the difference between the racial feats and the general feats. Yes, it's all well and good to claim that racial feats require you to be an elf or something, but a lot of the general feats are about as useful and specific. Seriously, who the fuck is going to have proficiency in a Talenta or Xen'drik boomerang except a Talenta halfling or Xen'drik drow?
Elf power! Now, if I make these ghoststrike blades, I'll look like Darth Maul..
Very rarely, however, they fuck up and let a feat through which is marginally useful. For example, Daylight Adaptation is a racial feat for nocturnal classes so they're not blinded by bright light. That covers everything from Drow to...er...other light-challenged races.
On the other hand, Dinosaur Wrangler is restricted to Halflings from the Talenta Plains with at least 1 rank in Handle Animal, and that's just bad. Because honestly, maybe somebody else wants to learn how to wrangle dinosaurs.
This link answers your next, obvious question.
Master Linguist is the kind of feat which is weird to me. If you know four languages, you can take this feat and learn a new language automatically at every level. That's not terrible - but it's still a bit shit, isn't it? Speak Language gives you a new language for every point in it, and that's capped by your level. Do you really want a feat which is the equivalent of giving your one more skill point per level? Mechanically, it's bad - you should probably have spent that feat on something that will let you face level-appropriate challenges. (And then of course there's Polyglot, but let's be honest, if you're breaking out that book then the warm liquid hitting your shin is not rain). So it's a decent fluff feat, but not a great mechanical feat.
Mutable Body for Shapechangers is again something that probably should have been a monstrous feat...y'know what, I don't care. It allows characters with the shapeshifter type (i.e. Changelings) to add +1 caster level to any Transmutation spell cast on them, which is probably inadequate. But then it says, if you're using the Action Points mechanic, you can blow 2AP to automatically make any transmutation spell on you extended or empowered. Pretty great for buffs, so long as you know what you're getting. Empowered eagle's splendor might not quite be Book of Erotic Fantasy territory, but +6 Cha isn't bad. Hell, with the right feats you can pull that off at 1st level.
Changelings get a lot of stuff like that in this section; Persona Immersion lets you detect any divination spell or telepathic psionic power of 3rd level or lower and supply false information - which basically means that it completely negates every ability the Mindspy has. Racial Emulation lets the shapechanger emulate all of a race's subtypes (like, Elf, Goblinoid, Fire, Extraplanar...I don't think this was thought out very well) for purposes of using magic items and crap. Which is fun, and flavorful, and probably broken, although I have no idea what happens if they try to banish you when you're emulating a non-native outsider or something. Presumably you get a quick one-way vacation to an Outer Plane of your choice. I'm sure there's someone out that that claims this would let the Changelings take basically any racial feat too, but...seriously, you want to burn a feat so you can burn another feat that you can only use while looking like an elf?
Path of Shadows is a Kalashtar feat requiring you to be a Kalashtar and take 5 ranks in Perform(dance). Not because of the strong Kalashtar bardic tradition or anything, but because somebody - I don't know who - had this hard-on for Kalashtars and dancing. I'm pretty sure there's like another feat and a prestige class somewhere about Kalashtars and dancing. It's very strange.
Behold, the might of the Kalashtar flamenco!
Some of these feats, I think people just weren't talking to each other. Soulblade Warrior is a racial feat for Kalashtar soulknives, which lets them manifest the mindblade as a swift action and increases their effective Soulknife level by 2 for purposes of mindblade enhancement (which doesn't come online until Level 6 anyway). It also lets you add your AP roll to damage whenever you burn an action point on a mindblade attack roll. It's very clearly intended to make everyone else feel small in the pants if they aren't a Kalashtar soulknife, no matter how much that class sucks...but why the fuck isn't it a psionic feat?
FrankT:
Feats in 3rd edition exist in a weird place. Originally they were set up as little pieces of character specialization – a thing that you took outside the normal leveling progression that would make one Ranger with an 18 strength different from another. But little questions like how good they should be or how thoroughly they should define your character were vague from the start. Five years into 3rd edition, these various different directional pulls on feats had basically killed the project, but people kept writing more of them. A normal character would, over the course of 20 levels of play, get seven feats. In your first 8 levels (the usual end of a real world campaign), you'd only see three. But with so many cooks making feats to try to do different things in every fucking book, there were literally thousands of feats. That's not even a joke, there were more than one pile of a thousand feats to choose from, and you would likely only ever see three of them in your character's lifetime. Not three thousand or three hundred, just literally the number three. The thing that comes after two. Needless to say, the wheat to chaff ratio of those feats was so terribad that there are probably books with dozens of feats in them where no live human has ever willingly selected any of those feats for their character in a real game.
No matter how many feats got printed, the number of feats your character actually got to have didn't rise.
So let's talk a bit on some of the ways feats were used.
Hot Patches. Sometimes a rule doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and even more often a rule doesn't work the way one of the authors wants it to. When this happens, an author can make a feat that changes that rule to work the way they want it to. If there is general agreement that that is how things should work, that feat becomes mandatory. In D&D parlance, that is called a “feat tax.” Examples of feat taxes are things like Tomb Tainted Soul, Zen Archery, and Educated. Tomb Tainted Soul is a feat that makes your character healed (instead of hurt) by necromantic energy instead of normal healing magic. This is absolutely fucking vital for Dread Necromancer characters, whose primary class feature is that they can fill the area they are standing in with necromantic energy. If you take Tomb Tainted Soul you are able to heal yourself at will, and if don't then when you use your energy burst power you kill yourself. It's not even a choice, all Dread Necromancers are required by law to take Tomb Tainted Soul and as a result all Dread Necromancers get one less selectable feat. So in any game starting below 9th level, they only get 2 feats to actually play with. Zen Archery is a feat that lets you use your Wisdom to shoot arrows, so if you want to play an archery shrine maiden you have to spend a feat on that. Educated puts knowledge skills on your skill list, so if you want to play a ____ scholar, where ____ is something like a warrior or assassin that doesn't have the knowledge skills you want on the class skill list, you have to spend a feat on it. There are hundreds of these fucking things, which are supposed to allow character options that clearly one of the authors thinks the rules should have supported from the beginning. Some of them don't even work, like the feat that lets you combine your Swashbuckler and Monk levels for purposes of calculating some abilities – but even those are clearly attempts to patch the game into allowing a character concept currently denied.
Make It A Feat. Roleplaying games are inherently open ended. Sometimes you want to do a thing that the game doesn't already have explicit rules for. When people write rules for ad hoc stunting they almost always talk about swinging on chandeliers. Which is weird, because it's a thing that comes up often enough that you'd think there would be a basic rule for it. Even if you did codify that one into the rules, there's still going to be an unlimited number of situations where someone is going to want to do something acrobatic and/or heroic. Maybe sled down a mountain on a shield or literally pull on a rug that a bunch of guards are standing on. But regardless, one of the things people keep doing is to make feats (game term meaning limited quantity selectable character ability) that codify these feats (natural language term meaning an impressive or noteworthy action). And what that does is shrink the play space. If I have to spend one of the seven feats I will ever get even if the game goes on for the rest of my natural life on being able to grab someone's weapon and stab them with it, that essentially stops being a stunt I will ever be able to do. And the flipside of course is that if that is one of the feats I took, I'm gonna use it all the fucking time. And it's worse even than that, because authors would split those actions up into little bits. And I mean little bits. That weapon snatching trick I talked about earlier is actually the result of four feats (Improved Unarmed Strike, Combat Expertise, Improved Disarm, and Snatch Weapon). So to do that at all you pretty much have to find a source of bonus feats, and your character is still the guy who just spams the same stunt over and over again until you lose interest in the character and the game.
Bullshit Bonuses. +1 to this, +2 to that. If you can't think of a thing for a feat to do, you can always fill page space by picking a number in the game and writing a feat that adds to it, either all the time or in certain situations. Sometimes these number bonuses end up being very important, pushing something crucially from non-viable to viable or bad to good or something. The community calls those feats “math fix feats” and treats them like a feat tax. Indeed, Zen Archery described above is also a bullshit bonus feat in addition to being a hot patch. But most of these are just wastes of space. I don't know if the authors of this book thought you were going to spend one of the handful of feats you were ever going to see on getting a +1 to attack rolls and armor class while on a ship, but obviously you are not going to do that. I can't even tell if this was being offered sarcastically, because tone of voice doesn't carry in the printed word. It's gone on record that Heinsoo and Tweet really have written bullshit bonus feats as attempts at sarcasm, but some others have been offered seriously and it's really impossible to tell just by reading the shitty feats in question.
AncientH:
There are ways to get more feats - if your Mister Cavern has a well-lubricated prick and a copy of Unearthed Arcana, you can pick up some character flaws at first level for some bonus feats, and many classes - like the Fighter and Wizard - have bonus feats as well. If you multiclass very carefully you can probably pick up a new feat or two at every level - but you're still not going to get multi-feat chains.
All of the Psionic feats in this section are also Kalashtar racial feats. That's not even a joke, it's just sad. My favorite is probably Shield of Thought, which lets a soulknife turn their mindblade into a mindshield. That's slightly less silly than it sounds, for a couple reasons. One, it immediately opens up all shield bash feats and tactics - which, okay, Soulknife is a shitty class anyway, but it's perfect for a low-level one-off or recurring NPC. I like to play my overspecialized Psionic NPCs as comic book supervillains - "Once more, you have incurred the wrath of The Shield!" - that sort of thing. You can also split a mindblade at 5th level, so it's possible to do psionic sword-and-shield fighting - again, not terrible for an NPC who is going to die horribly.
I shield well.
Shifters get "Shifter feats." Why aren't these just Racial feats? Because the more you take, the more times you can use your shining Shift power. They did that in Lords of Madness too, with Aberrant feats (which, hilariously, became kinda fun in Eberron because there was an optional rule where Aberrant Dragonmark characters could count those too.) Anyway, Shifter feats are almost universally crap - the one that tends to draw attention is Shifter Ferocity, which increases the damage dealt by your natural weapons by two steps while raging and shifting simultaneously ("two steps" makes me think this owes more to Earthdawn than not, but it might be a coincidence). This is one of those things where a one-step move is pretty easy to obtain from a bunch of different sources, and they all stack, so that if you are a shifter and if your burn your feats and get the right classes, you might be able to do as much damage as a wizard of the same level with a fireball. Not like, a mazimixed or empowered fireball, and not to as many people, but that's what you get for trying to be Sabertooth.
The shittier, blonder Wolverine.
Tactical Feats...I'll let Frank rant about these.
FrankT:
One attempt that D&D made to deal with the problem of people not getting enough feats was Tactical Feats. Rather than being one trick, they were like three or four. They still had a list of prereqs as long as your arm, but they gave you a list of abilities that could be used in various circumstances. This sometimes made you less of a one trick pony by giving you a list of things to do in different circumstances. Of course, sometimes we ended up with Tactical Feats where the three or four modifiers just synergized or only one was worth using and you still ended up being a one trick pony. That happened both with tactical feats that you used (like Shock Trooper or Elusive Target) and with ones that you didn't (like fucking Giantbane or Raptor School, which suck sweaty sweaty balls). But the bottom line is that by having 3 or 4 different maneuvers in one feat, you ended up with something that was much much more likely to make the cut than those 1/3 of a maneuver make it a feat feats described earlier. Tactical Feats have the highest ratio of “feats you might actually use” to “total feats written” of any category of feat. By a huge margin.
Now this is a book about Races of Eberron. It says that right on the cover of the book. That means that the authors felt pressed to make tactical feats for specific races. And it means that the authors chose the obscure Eberron-specific races to make feats for. So even if the tactical feats were good, they'd still be too specific to ever see play. Kalashtar Thoughtshifter is a tactical feat that you can only take if you are a Kalashtar Soulknife. You... are not... one of those... things. Now what it actually does is give you access to three separate things you can do to spend a power point to gain an inconsequential bonus if you've been futilely attacking the same target for several rounds. So it's not good. It's not even passable. If this ability was given out freely to all soulknives, they probably wouldn't use it. And that's if people played soulknives, which they don't. If you gave this for free to classes that have power points that players actually play (like Psionic Warriors), people still probably wouldn't use it. It's just dumb.
But because of all the formatting and shoveltext, Kalashtar Thoughtshifter uses up about a third of a page.
AncientH:
Battleshifter Training is a tactical feat and a racial feat, but not a shifter feat. Because fuck you. It also is one of those rare feats which doesn't let you have another feat, in this case Ragewild Fighting. I don't know why, they don't stack or anything.
Dancing with Shadows is a Kalashtar flamenco tactical feat. See, I told you! And there are more! I'm just too lazy to go find them. I bet somebody had a psionic dervish class planned.
The biggest problem with Tactical Feats is that they're most good at very low levels, but the prerequisites are such that you can't really get them until you're mid-level, at which point the game has begun to break down mechanically.
FrankT:
One of the ways this book uses up space is to have special feats to represent powers that some of the races probably should have had. So there are Shifter Feats that only Shifters can take and they improve their lyncanthropic change. If you spend enough feats on this shit, you can even be a passable werewolf. Of course, as previously mentioned, you don't actually get that many feats to spend, so this was a doomed design paradigm before it even started. The Warforged get the same deal. If you want to be a robot man with extending arms or a crushing jaw, you can do that – but you gotta spend feats. Again and still: 3.5 D&D does not give you enough feats to do that.
Lots of players want a character something like this, but they can't have it because that's more feats than you ever get. Also go fuck yourself.
AncientH:
Warforged feats are strange, and I'm going to go back for a second and talk about something we missed about warforged. See, as living constructs, warforged come built-in with armor...which can explicitly be enchanted with the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat. Which is honestly not a bad deal; a warforged can have themselves enchanted as Armor of Undead Controlling and make the party Necromancer feel small in the pants. But then you get Warforged feats which specifically change the composition of a warforged's anatomy and...I don't know how those are supposed to interact. I guess they stack? When they can? How does that work with the Unarmored Body feat? I don't know. It doesn't explicitly say.
Some of these also make certain warforged class combinations impossible. For example, a Warforged Druid who takes Mithral Body or Adamantine Body at first level "cannot cast any Druid spells or use any of the druid's supernatural or spell-like class features." Well, thanks. That's fucking useless, now isn't it?
Yeah, I got the Plate Armor of the Deep upgrade. I can talk to the fishes, now.
FrankT:
Racial Substitution Levels were, as previously described, never ever going to meaningfully fill the play space. But they were going to fill page space. Yes indeed! The Changeling Wizard option is just that if you want to specialize in Illusion or Transmutation you can increase the cost by 50% and apply your specialization bonuses to both schools. It's... a moderately OK deal and you might be tempted to do that. But explaining this extremely simple concept takes an entire page. Holy shit. And note: this isn't even a thing that applies to all changeling Wizards, just Changeling Wizards who want to specialize in Transmutation or Illusion and not ban-school the other one.
AncientH:
Changeling Egoist annoys me. It has "Body Control (Ex)", which is basically just a shittier version of the Mutable Body feat, except for Psychometabolism instead of Transmutation spells - and yet it costs you your bonus feat. Who does that? Why? Just make Mutable Body work for Transmutation and Psychometabolism and then give it to them as a bonus feat!
8th level Changelings rogues get to do a Mystique kind of thing where they shift their internal organs around so that people only have a 50% chance of stabbing them in the kidney with a sneak attack or critical hit. Which is fine. Then it goes to crazy town:
Oh, come the fuck on. Just let the chances add. Don't give me additional fucking rolls to make just because you're a lazy fucking bastard of a designer.If the changeling rogue has the ability to negate critical hits or sneak attacks by some additional means (such as armor with the fortification special ability), apply the chances separately.
Aside from the dual specialization nonsense that Frank mentioned, at 5th level Changeling wizards get the Morphic Familiar option - which is potentially awesome, although it would be more potentially awesome at a much lower level. Basically, this ability lets you turn your familiar into any other familiar you're allowed to have. So your crow familiar can fly to the castle, turn into a snake to crawl through a crack in the wall, turn into a cat to get past the booby trapped hallway, and then turn into an octopus and strangle the fucker as he sleeps in his bed. And that's just normal familiars; imagine the fun you can have with the Improved Familiar table! Eyeball Beholder, I chose you!
At some point, somebody decided that what they really wanted was two shitty flavors to go together - and so they decided to encourage people that Kalashtar want to dual-class as monk/soulknives. You don't get the full appreciation for that here, except that Kalashtar have racial substitution levels for both monk and soulknife, but buried somewhere is a feat where you can use flurry of blows with your mindblade and shit. Which would almost make them useful...no, I tell a lie.
Shifter druids can get a "beast spirit," which is not a spirit in the traditional sense because shup-up and requires a 3/4 page sidebar to explain all the bullshit small powers it gives you. Shifter rangers can share some of their shifting with their animal companion, which is a misdemeanor in Florida and Georgia. A shifter wilder...uh...why the fuck was Wilder a class, again? Also, why don't they have shifter barbarian, if they were going to fap that hard to it?
Warforged Artificer seems like a natural fit, but is just confusing. As mentioned previously, warforged can enchant themselves as suits of armor, so they can also basically imbue themselves...and they get the Tools of War ability, which lets them repair damage when imbuing...so can the heal themselves, or not?
My robot brain demands beer.
Fighters don't get nice things. So when you have a Fighter racial substitution level, you shouldn't take away the nice things they have - their bonus feats - and replace them with other, shittier things. And yet, there is the Warforged Fighter racial substitution levels.
There is a warforged paladin. As much fun as it might be to champion the cause of the Machine God, I don't think you're going to want to play one. Although I did once work on an NPC that was a warforged paladin who enchanted himself with armor from the Book of Exalted Deeds - I was determined to get some use out of the BoED - but sadly, the PCs never went down the path that led to him, and he rusts forgotten in the bowels of my campaign notes. Fair-thee-well, Fidelis.
Chapter 7: Prestige Classes
Eventually, parties end up looking like The Village People or the Justice League.
FrankT:
This chapter is 38 pages long and provides eight character options. Seriously. Eight. Not eight per page, not eight per race, not eight per class. Just eight. Total. This is the lowest information density this book gets, which considering how much we complain about low information density in this book is rather an impressive feat in and of itself.
Prestige Classes were originally brought in at the beginning of 3rd edition as a way to reconcile people being in a class based game and wanting to have their character get transformational advancement at some point. When you get into the mid-levels, you stop being a “Fighter” or a “Wizard” and start being a “Storm Lord” or a “Witch Queen” or something. Your class gets a cooler name and you get personalized and directionalized
development. This sort of mid-life character differentiation appeals to a lot of people. It ties in to how a lot of fiction goes, with characters becoming more distinctive and specific as their legend grows.
Not just any random dude in a hood.
As originally conceived, the prestige classes were examples. Your character stole the Eye of Misfortune and now you and your DM put together a Luck Stealer prestige class for your Rogue to jump into. The play space was limitless. Which is of course why it didn't really work out. Most people didn't want to write their own classes and most people wouldn't let you use homebrewed prestige classes anyway. They wanted “official” prestige classes. And even though each and every prestige class was basically an Elothar, they still wanted them to be from books with logos on them. What this meant was that the demand for Prestige Classes was exponentially large. You couldn't fill that play space. Everything you wrote and threw into that play space would achieve terminal velocity and drift out of reach of your light source long before hitting the bottom. Actually filling that playspace was prima facia absurd.
So WotC found that they could take 30-40 pages of prestige classes and put them in a book and people would thank them. It didn't make a dent in the play space, but it gave people officially printed things for their characters to do. And it created a very weird culture of “builds.” See, Prestige Classes were keyed to be stepping off points for people who had finished a character arc and wanted to step off into a new direction. So they were filled up with requirements. Must have a certain skill, must have completed the adventure you just did where you fought the Ogre Baron, must be named Elothar, and so on and so on. So when people started treating the specific ones that were printed as the specific ones they had to get into, they began warping their character growth and adventuring choices to fit the published Prestige Classes – rather than the original intention of writing new Prestige Classes to fit the characters and adventures they had. Kind of a tragedy really, and charop “build culture” is and was extremely stupid.
So anyway, somewhere along the way, WotC authors stopped treating the 30-40 pages of PrCs mandate as a way to generate lots and lots of content that players were going to want to read but probably not use, and started treating it as a rote exercise. There were simply a number of pages to fill with PrCs in each book, so the challenge was simply how to get each prestige class to fill up as many pages as possible. This leads to almost unbelievable and wholly pointless page bloat. Each Prestige Class in this book takes nearly five fucking pages, and is still just a single dude's character arc. Good or bad, we're still spending five pages talking about if you were a Changeling and you spent some time working for Doppelgangers, you could pick up some extra Doppelganger powers (that's the Cabinet Trickster). That's a concept that's maybe worth discussing in five paragraphs, not five pages.
AncientH:
Prestige classes also had the advantage in that they didn't require you trying to fill out twenty character levels, so they tended to be condensed compared to the base classes, especially Fighter and Sorcerer, which have a lot of "blank space." You could have prestige classes that were only 3, 5, or 10 levels - I don't know why they settled on those, because seriously, there were some prestige classes which were still mostly filler. Prestige classes answered needs that players didn't know they had - the for other abilities beyond the standard 12 core classes.
Frank touched on this when he was talking about the playspace, but every RPG has to run a fine line between how many options they give the players in relation to how much they've written for the game. One of the reasons AD&D was such a sprawling fucking mess is that it crawled up its own ass; despite efforts like the Encyclopedia Magica and the Spell Compendiums, the rules were just too spread out to be adequately managed - you ended up with a lot of duplication, a lot of limp-dick spells and effects, rules with special cases, and all in all a much more complicated game than anyone could play. Eventually, WotC brought out a new edition specifically to answer that problem - streamlined, organized classes. Common spells and effects to refer to. The joy of early D&D 3 was in the restructuring, and the innovation in taking what was a vast and unwieldy set of rules and boiling it down and organizing it so you could use it again.
Then, of course, they fucked it all up by making the same mistakes again.
FrankT:
The eight PrCs given in this book are:
- Atavist: A Kalashtar focuses on shitty unarmed fighting. Gets slightly different shitty unarmed fighting. No actual relation to Atavisms, name chosen out of a hat.
- Cabinet Trickster: A Changeling works for Doppelgangers. Gets Doppelganger powers.
- Moonspeaker: A Shifter Druid studies Undead on the side. Continues being a summoner Druid but gets to do the higher level shifter lyncanthropy crap without actually spending feats on it.
- Quori Nightmare: A Kalashtar spends some time in a psionic class. Gets some psionic fear powers.
- Reachrunner: A Shifter is a Ranger, takes scouting skills. Gets movement abilities that are way too weak for the level you'd have to be to do this shit.
- Recaster: A Changeling Wizard spends some time fiddling with their spells and then gets to line item change some features of their spells.
- Reforged: A Warforged spends some time learning the riddle of steel. Turns into a real boy.
- Spellcarved Soldier: A Warforged fighter wizard gets to fuck around with spell runes to continue being a fighter wizard.
AncientH:
Well, take a look at the entries. "Becoming ___", "Class Features," "Entry Requirements," Table, "Playing An ___", "Combat", "Advancement", "Resources", "____ in the World", "Organization", "NPC Reaction", "____ Lore", "____ in the Game", sample NPC/encounter...you don't need any of that except "Class Features," "Entry Requirements," and Table, and those are in the wrong fucking order.
Beyond what Frank said, some notes on the classes.
"Atavist" is called that because they're supposed to be a throwback to the quori spirit that birthed them or some shit; what they actually are is a prestige class designed for Kalashtar monks, soulknives, or monk/soulknives. You're never going to play one, because there's no big payoff.
Cabinet Trickster is basically the class that qualifies you for Mindspy. If you're a changeling with Cabinet Trickster and Mindspy, you're basically a Doppelganger for all purposes that matter.
You don't have to be a Druid to be a Moonspeaker, but you're never going to be a Shifter Paladin, are you? Might work for a Shifter Ranger, and I'd bet money that's what it was intended for.
Quori Nightmare is what it says on the tin - fear powers. Despite the name, it doesn't really interact or mesh with the Plane of Dreams or any other dream, sleep, or fear-causing/related power or ability in any way. I guess that one class from Heroes of Horror would mesh with it.
Reachrunner is about running. If you doubled this up with some of the Shifter feats, you end up with a character that can run very far, very fast, and still lose to a teleporting wizard or a druid who wildshapes into a cheetah.
Recaster is a much lower-level and shittier version of some of the aspects of the Archmage prestige class that people liked. The thing is that as you go up in level people like the ability to muck about with how their spells operate - cast fast, last longer, change the shape to suit the battlefield, switch out fire for ice...
...which is basically why metamagic feats are a thing. Recaster does that too. Just, y'know, crappier. And limited to a couple times a day.
Reforged, as Frank mentioned, is a 3-level prestige class about becoming something other than a warforged. The mechanics are double-plus ungood, in that they're so poorly worded it's unclear if the stated effects are what the writer intended to arrive at. Unlike some classes which top out with you becoming a dragon or a fire elemental or something, in this one you end up being a...I'm not sure. I mean, you're still technically a warforged, but you lose a lot of warforged traits, and gain some non-warforged traits, but you're still a warforged. It's confusing.
Spellcarved Soldier is especially weird because, as mentioned, as a warforged you can totally enchant your native armor. Also, I'm just going to point out something:
That is not a necessary example. The PHB already tells you that different types of damage reduction don't stack, and only the best applies. You TWATMUFFIN.Rune of Warding: At 5th level, you carve the final rune of the spellcarved into your plating, granting you damage reduction 5/magic when it is active. This neither stacks with nor overlaps any damage reduction you might already have, but applies normally to any attack with a nonmagical weapon. For example, if you have the Adamantine Body feat (granting you damage reduction 2/adamantine), you reduce the damage from nonmagical weapons (including nonmagical adamantine weapons) by 5, and reduce the damage from magic weapons that are not adamantine by 2. Attacks by magic adamantine weapons deal full damage to you.
FrankT:
Prestige Classes were ultimately a failed experiment. There were a lot of things about them that people loved, but it never worked properly and was never going to work properly. By 2005, WotC was going through only the barest of motions in pretending to try. The proforma had gotten so bloated that it was just an exercise in wasting wordcount.
AncientH:
You might think we're ranting pretty hard for a book that might as well be called Special Snowflakes of Eberron, but that's sort of the point. This book reads like Special Needs of Eberron, the Shortbus edition, where even the characters that they try desperately to get you to care about are at best only "meh," and the book has been hit so hard by the balance stick that there's nothing even worth porting to your home campaign.
Next up: More crunch!
Unless you're playing 3.0, you can't empower Eagle's Splendor because it doesn't have a random result. I'm sure you could find a 3.5E Transmutation buff with a random result if you poked around for a while, but feats where you have to dumpster-dive for applications are lame.Empowered eagle's splendor might not quite be Book of Erotic Fantasy territory, but +6 Cha isn't bad.
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Ancient History
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Was really hoping you might point out how goddam garbage Dr 5/Magic is at approximately 10, when you get it, but I guess pointing out how they had an example explaining the rules in the PHB is stupid too.
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Ancient History
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Pointing out that any prestige class feature is underpowered at any level is a pointless exercise; pretty much all of them are. That's what I mean when I talk about all of these character options getting hit too hard by the balance stick - while some of them are clearly intended to be incentives for players to play some of these Eberron-specific options, the prerequisites are so high and drawbacks are so crap, that none of these things are a good option unless you find one that is actually completely broken.
Which I don't rule out, but we've talked about stuff like the Warshaper already.
Which I don't rule out, but we've talked about stuff like the Warshaper already.
It really puts it in perspective when you realize almost every game ends at 10 so even somebody like a Human Fighter 10 is barely getting 10 feats and the game has printed thousands of them.
What do you suppose the Worthwhile/Worthless ratio is? Gotta be at least 20 to 1. The game lasted 8 years and might have printed 300 worthwhile feats and half of 'em are probably feat taxes.
A feat starved class like a Barbarian or a Paladin is stuck at 4 in that scenario I think.
I didn't think you were telling the truth about the Elf Druid from a Specific Eberron Nation With a Baboon Animal Companion was true. It just sounded like a joke. But sure enough, there it is, Aerenal Beastmaster, page 105. Holy Mackerel!
What do you suppose the Worthwhile/Worthless ratio is? Gotta be at least 20 to 1. The game lasted 8 years and might have printed 300 worthwhile feats and half of 'em are probably feat taxes.
A feat starved class like a Barbarian or a Paladin is stuck at 4 in that scenario I think.
I didn't think you were telling the truth about the Elf Druid from a Specific Eberron Nation With a Baboon Animal Companion was true. It just sounded like a joke. But sure enough, there it is, Aerenal Beastmaster, page 105. Holy Mackerel!
Well the advantage of locking options behind feats is that the DM can always give his creatures the appropriate feat, whenever it can be useful, since creatures usually only last a single scene anyway. And you don't have to really worry about how powerful the feat is, since players don't have the feat slots to select them anyway.
Gary Gygax wrote:The player’s path to role-playing mastery begins with a thorough understanding of the rules of the game
Bigode wrote:I wouldn't normally make that blanket of a suggestion, but you seem to deserve it: scroll through the entire forum, read anything that looks interesting in term of design experience, then come back.
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Josh_Kablack
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Ok, now I'm curious.
If both feats and PrCs are design failures, what are viable possible solutions for allowing customization in class+level systems ? Should differences between characters of the same class be only cosmetic? Should differences all be in-class selections, like choice of animal companion or favored school?
If both feats and PrCs are design failures, what are viable possible solutions for allowing customization in class+level systems ? Should differences between characters of the same class be only cosmetic? Should differences all be in-class selections, like choice of animal companion or favored school?
"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."
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Ancient History
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No, that's the 4e approach, and it sucks.Should differences between characters of the same class be only cosmetic?
I don't think there's one right answer, and I don't think it's as simple as "how many PC combinations should we have?" Part of it is that, as Frank and others have pointed out repeatedly, the basic class design in D&D is fundamentally broken. Fighters don't get nice things and wizards make everyone feel small in the pants eventually. You can't change that without doing a fundamental re-think of your whole system and the core concepts that underlie it, and the goals that you're striving for. D&D4e went in a big way for what it thought was game balance, but it tossed the baby out with the bath water - what they got was flavorless pap that made race-taxing practically guaranteed.
If you're going to do a class+level system, you want options that are actual options - i.e., each possible choice is equally viable and doesn't fundamentally hamstring the character. The debate over whether to be a Generalist wizard or a Specialist one should be worth having, for example.
I think the main point is that neither of those is per se a design failure so much as the implementation.Josh_Kablack wrote:Ok, now I'm curious.
If both feats and PrCs are design failures, what are viable possible solutions for allowing customization in class+level systems ? Should differences between characters of the same class be only cosmetic? Should differences all be in-class selections, like choice of animal companion or favored school?
So for example lots of feats are not actually a problem, see metamagic, and to an extent tactical feats. It is just that WotC so very very often have this idea of what constitutes "really powerful" that includes extremely bullshit tiny stuff, or small number increases. [insert famous "toughness is really great feat" commentary]
With PrCs, the problem is that they have extremely specific requirements fluff, and then tell a specific story, so any PrC really only applies to one character, and because people only want to accept PrCs that are in a book, this means people build only a small number of character types because they have to all be Church Inquisitors who are interested in knowledge and who meet a person who represents the Divine to get the best Cleric PrCs.
And all Beguilers are either gnomes or really interested in Coatls.
So Frank points out that this could totally be solved by people writing the specific PrCs for each character in game. But it can also be helped by making every PrC have no requirements at all aside from level, and provide level appropriate abilities.
So you could have each PrC be a specific option for all characters, so anyone who, for RP reasons, wants to be a shapeshifter, can just slap on some Master shfiter or whatever. It makes every word written for PrCs apply to thousands more characters than they do now, and doesn't force you to build into a specific direction.
You still need to deal with the problem that Incantatrixs are just better than Geometers, but that is dealt with by making the PrCs not suck as much.
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
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I think something beyond JUST level is needed, but nowhere near the level of bullshit that we have in 3.5 PrCs. "Arcane Caster Level" for example is something I see as a valid prereq for Archmage. No you cannot take Archmage just because your 10th level Fighter dipped one level of Wizard. Similarly I am not offended by a BAB prerequisite, or to some degree even skill prerequisites (if the PrC is heavily skill based. For example some sort of super ninja prestige class requiring Hide 10 ranks instead of level 7).So Frank points out that this could totally be solved by people writing the specific PrCs for each character in game. But it can also be helped by making every PrC have no requirements at all aside from level, and provide level appropriate abilities.
But requiring things like specific class features, feats, or spells, or campaign events that make getting into the class a chore? Fuck that shit.
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Ancient History
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I am unconvinced. Level is the only thing that reliably sets the bar for how powerful you should expect the prestige class to be. BAB and Spell level requirements sort of do this, but still spit in the face of a viable multiclassing system since they make it so different builds can enter a prestige class at different levels, and that will fuck things up right there.Seerow wrote: I think something beyond JUST level is needed, but nowhere near the level of bullshit that we have in 3.5 PrCs. "Arcane Caster Level" for example is something I see as a valid prereq for Archmage. No you cannot take Archmage just because your 10th level Fighter dipped one level of Wizard. Similarly I am not offended by a BAB prerequisite, or to some degree even skill prerequisites (if the PrC is heavily skill based. For example some sort of super ninja prestige class requiring Hide 10 ranks instead of level 7).
Would it really be so bad if a 10 Fighter/1 Wizard was able to enter into Archmage? Or vice versa for some fighting prestige class? Maybe it would, but not because of the Archmage/Swordmaster portion, it would be due to that caster and non-caster base classes fail to stack. A separate problem.
Skill ranks are at least half of the bullshit requirements for prestige classes that have force people to have inorganic characters just to meet a stupid requirement.
Nah, I'd say character level only final destination is the best way to set PrC requirements. Next up on the docket would be fixing multiclassing of course, but you'll need to right the boat by making sure prestige classes are being entered at the appropriate level for what they make available.
Unless the point is to give a prestige option aimed at the fightery types instead of the roguish types. For the same reason you would want to restrict Archmage from someone without a certain level of casting, you might want to restrict a warrior prestige class until someone has a certain level of combat badassery.Ancient History wrote:I am offended by a BAB prerequisite, because it fucks over very many classes that don't have fighter progression. If you want to make sure characters are this tall before riding the prestige class, just fucking set a level limit for entry.
Sure if you have a class that you want rogues to be able to get into, or don't care if it's fighter or rogue, give it a level prerequisite. But that does not mean the existence of a BAB prerequisite is an awful thing. And if some rogue type gets into it a few levels late, and ends up with non-level appropriate abilities because they took a class intended for somebody else levels earlier, that's their own damn fault, just like it would be the Paladin's fault if he tried to enter a class with the prerequisite Divine Casterlevel 5 at level 10, because that is when he qualified for it.
Last edited by Seerow on Sat Feb 28, 2015 9:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Ancient History
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BAB requirements are bad on the face. If you're a fighter, it's too damn high for the feats you want. Fucking Tactical Feats should not come online at 6th level. If you're not a fighter, it's too damn high period.
And, more to the point, a BAB requirement never has anything to do with the abilities of the prestige class. Never.
And, more to the point, a BAB requirement never has anything to do with the abilities of the prestige class. Never.
We're talking about prestige classes. What does this little rant about bab requirements on feats have to do with anything? Even if we were talking about feats, that is a sign the feats are not level appropriate, rather than a sign that the BAB requirements are bad. (With tactical feats specifically, the chain of feats required to unlock the average one is absurd. And a lot of the tactical feats provide 3 minor bullshit effects you don't care about even if you got them for free as you noted. BAB requirements has nothing at all to do with how effective they are).Ancient History wrote:BAB requirements are bad on the face. If you're a fighter, it's too damn high for the feats you want. Fucking Tactical Feats should not come online at 6th level. If you're not a fighter, it's too damn high period.
Well the only way around BAB requirements while still signaling "Hey this is for Fighter types!" is to add something new like "Martial Power Level" which will ultimately boil down to the same thing. So why not use BAB and just accept that yes, BAB is supposed to be indicative of how badass you are when it comes to hitting people with a stick, and having a higher BAB gets you access to better stuff in that area.And, more to the point, a BAB requirement never has anything to do with the abilities of the prestige class. Never.
Why do we need that sort of thing anyway? Warrior type feats and PrCs will be picked by warrior types and not wizards because they advance weapons fighting and not casting. Caster PrCs will be picked because they advance casting. Sure, one of the benefits of a class based system is being able to stop certain combos from happening, and there will be certain class/PrC combination you'll want to restrict, but that's not really applicable to a requirement that merely restricts you to one fourth of all classes.
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Ancient History
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You may be talking about prestige classes, but I'm talking about the whole lot.What does this little rant about bab requirements on feats have to do with anything?
Fighters already have to navigate their way through seas of feat-chains, in a very unfriendly feat-economy. Why add the extra wrinkle? Why, again, do you insist that the character has to be so high to ride the prestige class? It's not a matter of power level - we've already established that most of prestige classes aren't about gaining more power, it's just about veering off into a different career field with more interesting abilities. It's like saying you've graduated highschool, but you're not 3rd level yet so you can't go to college yet, go fuck off and take a gap year or something.Well the only way around BAB requirements while still signaling "Hey this is for Fighter types!" is to add something new like "Martial Power Level" which will ultimately boil down to the same thing. So why not use BAB and just accept that yes, BAB is supposed to be indicative of how badass you are when it comes to hitting people with a stick, and having a higher BAB gets you access to better stuff in that area.
If you want to say "This is just for level 5+ fighters" as a requirement, just say "Level 5 or higher, must be proficient with halberds."
FrankTrollman wrote:I think Grek already won the thread and we should pack it in.
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With the exception of having the tarrasque as a mount-- isn't that just a Warforged Ftr/Warlock with Adamantine Plating and Mounted Combat? Hell, write up a Warforged Component called Spark Chamber, which takes the chest slot, and gives them Alternate Form. They don't even need a lot of Warlock, because it's just there for "blaster cannon arm." I suppose you could say he has Leadership too, but that's still only three feats and a custom item that's totally legal. The biggest obstacle to this concept is that you'll never get high enough level to have the Tarrasque as your cohort. But you could also replace the Tarrasque with Half Dragon Tyrannosaur. Which might be the three level Half Dragon thing written for Tome.FrankTrollman wrote:
Lots of players want a character something like this, but they can't have it because that's more feats than you ever get. Also go fuck yourself.
I suppose you could say that size is the other problem, but I'm pretty sure between PrCs and permanencied magic, you can play an Optimus sized warforged.
There are two kinds of feats you're talking about here- "Body" feats and "Tracery" feats. Body feats change what kind of armour your warforged has and specifically say-AncientH wrote: Warforged feats are strange, and I'm going to go back for a second and talk about something we missed about warforged. See, as living constructs, warforged come built-in with armor...which can explicitly be enchanted with the Craft Magic Arms and Armor feat. Which is honestly not a bad deal; a warforged can have themselves enchanted as Armor of Undead Controlling and make the party Necromancer feel small in the pants. But then you get Warforged feats which specifically change the composition of a warforged's anatomy and...I don't know how those are supposed to interact. I guess they stack? When they can? How does that work with the Unarmored Body feat? I don't know. It doesn't explicitly say.
So, it's unlikely that someone will have more than one. I suppose if Flaws are in, you could theoretically have three of them, say Adamantine, Mithral and Ironwood, in which case I would look at the language used ("armour bonus increases to") and say they are applied in the order of Ironwood, Mithral, Adamantine, and you wind up with a warforged with +8 armour, +1 Max Dex, -5 ACP, and 35% ASF Heavy Armour, as well as DR 2/adamantine and 2/slashing. And you can't cast druid spells.* Body wrote:Special: Unlike most feats, this feat must be taken at 1st level during character creation.
Unarmoured specifically doesn't play with those at all-
*any of the "Body" feats, Improved Damage ReductionUnarmoured Body wrote:If you later select any warforged feat* that grants or adjusts an armour bonus or damage reduction, you lose this feat and all its effects
Basically, they are Hot Patch style feats because someone said "Hey, what if people want to select the kind of armour their Warforged has?" They were present in ECS too, and I have no clue why they were reprinted in RoE, other than to fill space (they reprinted Shifter feats too), but I don't know why they didn't just make them selectable racial traits, since they're overall more of a trade off than a strict power up, or could be made such fairly easily. Alternatively, they should just be things warforged characters can go have done to them, like they walk up to an NPC Artificer and say "I need better armour, here's some money, wake me when you're done"
...huh. Now I'm wondering if a gestalt Monk/Soulknife might almost be worthwhile in a non-gestalt game, maybe if their abilities were finessed together a bit...Ancient History wrote:At some point, somebody decided that what they really wanted was two shitty flavors to go together - and so they decided to encourage people that Kalashtar want to dual-class as monk/soulknives. You don't get the full appreciation for that here, except that Kalashtar have racial substitution levels for both monk and soulknife, but buried somewhere is a feat where you can use flurry of blows with your mindblade and shit. Which would almost make them useful...no, I tell a lie.
Maybe it's different between the two versions, but my Races of cover copy says "(including himself)" (*rantaboutmagicrobotgender*)Warforged Artificer seems like a natural fit, but is just confusing. As mentioned previously, warforged can enchant themselves as suits of armor, so they can also basically imbue themselves...and they get the Tools of War ability, which lets them repair damage when imbuing...so can the heal themselves, or not?
I don't know what the Eberron cover one is like, but the Races of cover class's effects seem pretty clear-AH wrote:Reforged, as Frank mentioned, is a 3-level prestige class about becoming something other than a warforged. The mechanics are double-plus ungood, in that they're so poorly worded it's unclear if the stated effects are what the writer intended to arrive at. Unlike some classes which top out with you becoming a dragon or a fire elemental or something, in this one you end up being a...I'm not sure. I mean, you're still technically a warforged, but you lose a lot of warforged traits, and gain some non-warforged traits, but you're still a warforged. It's confusing.
Extroverted: +X to Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Info, Sense Motive; X=Reforged class level
Natural Healing: You have natural healing now, which works just like it does for a human. This is shit, but that's because natural healing is shit and no one bothers with it, but it's clear.
Refoged Insight: +2 on wisdom checks and wisdom skills. Pretty clear--though I'm not sure how frequently anyone's going to have to make a wisdom check.
Magical Healing: Magical healing benefits you just like it would a human.
Embrace Emotion: Morale bonuses are 1 point higher for you.
Final Forging: Could have just said "Replace all warforged feats with other feats, and gain Unarmoured Body even though it's a Warforged feat."
So basically it's a kind of cool two level dip for warforged who use social skills and wisdom skills. I could see it being a nice dip if you're a warforged paladin (which makes me think that was a character one of the writers played). Final Forging is the only ability where it's sort of questionable what the writer intended, since, RAW, it allows you to replace your warforged feats with other warforged feats. But third level is crap anyway.
Last edited by Prak on Sat Feb 28, 2015 10:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.