I would have liked to play D&D... · 8:14am Jan 6th, 2014
So every Sunday, me and my friends get together for RP-related purposes. And it's fun; right now we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I'm the DM, and I'm taking my players through the Tomb of Horrors, because, I dunno, I hate the concept of friendship or something.
I kid, I kid, we're having a blast.
Still, while I don't always DM and in fact we rotate fairly regularly as we finish one campaign and move on to the next, we also tend to rotate games when we do it. So while I run D&D as a Dungeon Master quite a bit, it has been a long time since I've been able to play as a player, and as we will soon be moving on to Spycraft once my group has finished/been killed by the Tomb, it looks like it will be longer still.
Recently it looked like this might have changed via a different gaming group that a friend at work was going to put together, and it was even going to be Pathfinder, but, unfortunately, my Mondays usually involve me, well, working. So it's not something I could do with any regularity, and groups with a player that can't guarantee he shows up every week are not conducive to play. So I had to bow out.
Shame. I was gonna be a barbarian with the urban barbarian and invulnerable rager archetypes. Aelioanna would have been a fun character to play.
Oh well...Imma save her and hold her on standby, just in case.
Areola, huh? What a name for a female barbarian...
1688667
Aeola. EE-oh-lah. I had actually figured I'd make it short for Aelioanna, and come up with a massively long name for her that she introduces herself with.
Why, what's an areo...
[looks it up]
Oh God why the Hell did I not remember that.
PMS + berserker rage = OP
1688670 Ah. Sorry. Well, it's only one letter, and I'm sure half of everyone else will read it the same way I did.
You don't have a ten foot pole listed. I'm disappointed.
1688674
Yeah, I just changed her name.
1688680
Well, I had some spare gold left over, so it wouldn't be hard to add one.
You might consider buying a pair of gauntlets and a guisarme. Having a 2-handed reach weapon AND adjacent reach could be very handy. Also, a bow.
1688691
The goal was actually to get into Duelist.
1688697 Well, on the bright side, it's not quite as terrible as the 3e version is.
1688699
There were going to be 4 other people in the group besides me and the DM, and of them, only I had ever actually played D&D before. It was not going to be high-op, is what I'm driving at; a single-handed finesse build into duelist was going to be viable enough.
Sometimes it's nice to play a character rather than run a build; hence why I bothered to give her any Charisma bonus.
1688702 I...guess so. Though the idea of playing a person as fairly ineffectual -- and yet risks his life by fighting horrors from beyond -- is somewhat alien to me. That's kind of like Mini-Me trying to compete in the Olympic triathlon.
1688704
If you're gonna make that argument, then its logical conclusion is that anyone who isn't a Tier-1 class is needlessly risking their lives and should go home.
1688716 Not entirely true. Tier 2s can be pretty amazing, and even tier 3s can be exceptionally potent. Hell, I built a 3rd Edition monk that could solo every one of the big bads from the Elder Evils sourcebook, though it did help that I had a hardness score in the 80s, was undetectable to anything without Touchsight, Life Sense, or Mindsight (basically invisible to vision, low light vision, darkvision, blindsense, blindsight, tremorsense, See Invisibility, and True Seeing), could make around a dozen unarmed strike attacks per round with a thrown range increment of nearly 100', could kill the most powerful monster in the epic level handbook within 3 or so hits, could hit anything on an incorporeal ranged touch attack, could kill quite a few enemies with a single attack, and could Polymorph into almost any creature or object with 7 HD or less. I also had all the immunities of an inanimate object whenever I wanted them. Oh, and I could burst through my enemies like a gore-soaked KoolAid Man.
I abused the hell out of WBL, but you weren't expecting me to be effective without it, did you?
1688716
I like it. But why no buckler?
1688736
Personally my "sweet spot" is Tier-3 and Tier-4. I think that anything below Tier 4 should be dragged up to be at least Tier 4, while anything above Tier 3 should be dragged down to a more sane level.
I also just don't find optimization on that level to be fun.
Also, your monk still died horribly to a wizard, cleric, or other caster with access to things like commune and simulacrum, Given the prevalence of "casts spells like a sorcerer" in some of the more powerful monsters (dragons, solars, etc.), there's quite a few of those. Plus the odd actual sorcerer or wizard.
So you were, in fact, running someone who was ineffectual and yet risked his life by fighting against horrors from beyond.
1688754 I'm definitely not arguing against being destroyed by Epic Spellcasting -- that stuff can do anything. But I could easily take out any of the Elder Evils one-on-all-of-them -- I checked -- and they're literal campaign destroyers.
1688740
Don't want to rely on it (by having it enchanted n' junk) - Duelist, once I class into it, requires the off-hand to be completely empty for its main feature, and a buckler would probably be argued to violate that.
1688759
Actually epic spellcasting is fairly horrible, unless you mean epic spell level slots which allow for juicy metamagic. But having said that, most of the most broken cheese in the game are only about 5th-7th-level spells, with the occasional 9th-level spice sprinkled on.
Alot of the fun in our gestalt 3.5 game isnt the power, its the interaction. We are doing the Red Hand of Doom. a bit of a long running campaign. But while we havent gone far at all, really, the sessions have been spent more on role play than stat work, and we've been having a blast. The irony that all of the group, having ties to dragonkind, good and evil.
We have a human fellow of bahamut whom is in utter terror of one avain thats teasing him. A golden half dragon thats managing to build a reputation as someone you dont mess with, or else. But he's far more the intimidating one of our group, and yet one of the kinder ones. Straight as an edge, yet, its a subversion of the holy warrior in that he's a nice guy, just dont be a prick, or you get the pick. Our newest one is a blue half dragon, much more human than our more gold reptilian friend, and in these woods out of a mix of vendetta, there's been the good humored staring matches between him and our other dragon, and has a little mage in him. The final of our four man band is an gryphic avian, drawing upon the realms of pure magic, and draconic magic, with hidden results.
But we've had all of, 3 fights in about 6 games, its just been fun that we've done more role play, and enjoying the fun of that rewarding enterprise. Class wise, its all simple, fighter/cleric. Paladin/cleric, ranger/sorc, and warlock/dragonfire adept. But classes have been really secondary, more the interaction.
Kossigan (the gold) is thinking The Elusive (Gryphic) and vincent (human) are an item, at her poking and worldplay. While kossigan and sayorin (The other half dragon) are engaged in the warrior stare off. You have the vincent and sayorin interaction about his past, and that vengeance. But each character has reasons for and against certain parts of everyone, and its all in fun, as there's a big united threat of an army coming down upon the land, and they have to unite and race to save everyone, mending and fixing their little hiccups.
Im glad to know a good dm, and the journal of interaction being much more important than combat, with players whom are the same.
1688764 Well, that's somewhat true, especially if you're thinking "direct damage." Epic DD sucks horribly. Luckily, direct damage sucks anyway, so the good (and much easier) stuff is through other special effects. But even then it's really easy to get the Epic Spellcraft DC mitigation low enough that you could do virtually anything, including research and casting both as a free action. Shaving off 1,000,000 from the DC isn't too terribly difficult, with enough minions from Leadership. Hell, I have one build that is technically reachable around level 9 that can knock off over 34,000,000 points from the Epic Spellcraft DC. I'm pretty sure that gets you into "I create my own reality" levels of fun.
1688769
Red Hand of Doom is fun. Prior to the Tomb, I actually ran my players through the campaign, the Tomb is serving as just the "one last adventure" for the party. Red Hand has easily joined the likes of Temple of Elemental Evil, White Plume Mountain, or, hell, The Tomb of Horrors itself, as one of the best D&D modules ever made.
My group's players for RHoD were a samurai, a monk, a bard, a paladin, and a evoker wizard. Though, it's worth noting that we ran RHoD in what amounts to Pathfinder with massive homebrewing (for example, the samurai mentioned above was basically a gestalt of the Complete Warrior samurai, the Pathfinder samurai, the Oriental Adventures samurai, and the iaijutsu master prestige class), and I changed around a few minor things here and there in the module itself (most noteably updating all the monsters and enemies to account for the changes made to the classes).
It gave us a lot of stories, but since most of them would be spoilers for you if you haven't gone through RHoD yet, I won't relate them.
Mostly, though, what I hold RHoD up as, is a shining example of the fact that you don't need to be high level to do epic things. The recommended levels are 6-12, my own group went from 5-9. In D&D terms, this is pretty low - but they still saved a city, fought an army, slew dragons and demons and undead abominations, foiled the plans of an evil overlord, and defied a goddess.
1688778 I had played Rhod in 2nd edition, and mainly as the party rogue then, this time, given that we are going in at 10, the trivial fights are more done as simple, or changed, akin to what needed to be done for the 3.5 version of the ToH and the return, as that game has a cursed history with our groups, its killed the enjoyment for no less than 4 gaming groups through bad dice luck alone. So its very much avoided for that.
1688790
...Red Hand of Doom was first published in 2006, for 3.5 edition...how did you play a 2nd Edition version? Is there one floating on the internet somewhere?
1688792 Its based on a greyhawk campaign, I'd have to find to find it again, it used iuz the evil routing the critters over the expected tiamat spawn. Its more of a spiritual re-imagining than direct aspect.
I know that feeling... I used to play a lot more, but my schedule is so unusual (I could tell you if I'll be working on august 22, 2015 but I can't promise a free weekly day) that it makes it really difficult for me to join a group :(
We were playing Mutants and Masterminds for a while and I loved my character! He had the alternate form power with multiple forms, all based on chitineous arthropods (mostly insects)! They had tough exoskeleton, additional senses and modes of locomotion (swimming sounds lame until you get what is essentially a Bag of Holding Water that lets you flood everything
and my grasshopper form could leap 200 times the normal distance.) and all sorts of tricks for many situations. He sadly proved a bit TOO powerful (all that despite not min-maxing on flaws all that much) in combat, so almost everybody else would be reduced to paste by stuff that would damage me (in adition to great strength and toughness I also had regenerative power in my alternate forms), and yet I was pretty much useless in any investigative procedure. The others had all the useful skills and stats and so, despite my high INT score, I pretty much ended up as the dumb muscle (I'm not that good of a roleplayer too 
) so I'm glad we're at the end because I felt a bit like a problem spot there for a while.
Though I will always cherish the memory of that time I threw a tree trunk at the back of a giant robot's knee and caused it to fall flat on its face and crush the two evil masterminds inside.
I hope I'll be able to play again if we do another game, but considering my schedule I don't know if I want to impose it on the others
Dear god how I miss D&D.
This. Just...this.
1688764
Ah, not planning on staying Barbarian, eh? Pathfinder's a lot better at encouraging you to stay with one base class than 3.0 or 3.5 were.
Actually, if you were planning single hand finesse fighter, I see how that stacks well with the Urban Barbarian's rage bonus and it's ability to increase Dex.
The biggest issue with that type of high dex character is trying to find armor that lets you use your full dex bonus.
1688699
The secret to playing 3e Duelist is it goes from terrible to 'very good but not as broken as a lot of other stuff' with three levels of rogue and that one feat that makes your duelist levels stack with your rogue levels for determining sneak attack.