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evil-frosty
2010-05-13, 06:44 PM
I was just looking at this template and was wondering whats so bad about it? It has some very nice features but at high levels when someone would get this they seem a little mute or easily circumvented. The only problem I see is it probably deserves a higher LA.

Greenish
2010-05-13, 07:02 PM
What's supposed to be bad in it?

Reynard
2010-05-13, 07:09 PM
It's only allowed by the characters following his vow unfaltering for at least 6 levels (If you have VoP). That is roleplaying, and since the kinds of people who roleplay don't want decent templates, and the kinds that do want it are incapable of roleplay, it's a pointless template.*




*No, I don't believe this bull.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 07:19 PM
Why VoP? You can easily get 3 exalted feats by 6 without it.

Samb
2010-05-13, 07:22 PM
Why VoP? You can easily get 3 exalted feats by 6 without it.

Some people forget that VoP also costs feats as well, effectivily negating the bonus exalted feats you get from VoP itself. And the fact that there really are only a handful of decent exalted feats to begin with.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 07:32 PM
It's one of the best LA+2 templates in the game. It's hard to keep, and requires being Exalted, but is pretty badass if you have it. Just make sure the DM's onboard and isn't going to throw any unsolvable ethical dilemmas at you.

Toxic Avenger
2010-05-13, 07:33 PM
And the fact that there really are only a handful of decent exalted feats to begin with.Yeah, and depending on your DM, if you even dare to ask about taking one of those, you risk getting smacked with the DMG... :smallannoyed:

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 07:34 PM
Just make sure the DM's onboard and isn't going to throw any unsolvable ethical dilemmas at you.

If he does then he didn't read BoED, as the book itself tells him not to do that.

evil-frosty
2010-05-13, 07:46 PM
So its not the template that is broken as i heard, but the fact that some DMs will just completely screw the player over. Ok I guess I misinterpreted what people were saying when i first heard of it.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 07:57 PM
If he does then he didn't read BoED, as the book itself tells him not to do that.
Or they just didn't think through all of the implications.

From a real session of mine, this half-Devil had my friends captive, and was going to torture them (and me) to death, but would release them if I agreed to provide healing for his other torture victims so they can be tortured longer. The DM didn't even realize at the time that, under their definitions, both ways led to loss of Exalted status. We eventually resolved it though.

PhoenixRivers
2010-05-13, 08:08 PM
Or they just didn't think through all of the implications.

From a real session of mine, this half-Devil had my friends captive, and was going to torture them (and me) to death, but would release them if I agreed to provide healing for his other torture victims so they can be tortured longer. The DM didn't even realize at the time that, under their definitions, both ways led to loss of Exalted status. We eventually resolved it though.

Actually, being tortured to death would not. An exalted character can control his own actions and choices. He is not responsible for the actions of the half-devil, and those actions would not cost him his exalted status.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 08:11 PM
"Provide healing to the other victims" is obviously the right answer, as he has to free your hands to do so.

Toxic Avenger
2010-05-13, 08:45 PM
"Provide healing to the other victims" is obviously the right answer, as he has to free your hands to do so.Yup. And then you actually do heal them after you finish curb-stomping the fiend, so that way no one can say you lied...

Milskidasith
2010-05-13, 08:55 PM
But you have to make sure you don't have too much fun beating up the fiend, because that would be taking pleasure others pain...

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 08:55 PM
Yup. And then you actually do heal them after you finish curb-stomping the fiend, so that way no one can say you lied...

Yes, exactly. :smallamused:
"You never said 'immediately...'"

Toxic Avenger
2010-05-13, 09:08 PM
Yes, exactly. :smallamused:
"You never said 'immediately...'"... :smalleek:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!


EDIT: Oh, right. For a second, I thought that you meant that as if to say "You never said you healed them immediately after curbstomping the fiend, and thus fell." My bad. :smallbiggrin:

Gametime
2010-05-13, 09:16 PM
From a real session of mine, this half-Devil had my friends captive, and was going to torture them (and me) to death, but would release them if I agreed to provide healing for his other torture victims so they can be tortured longer. The DM didn't even realize at the time that, under their definitions, both ways led to loss of Exalted status. We eventually resolved it though.

I don't think "being unable to prevent the torture and death of a friend" is considered a non-good act in D&D. Presumably, the best course of action would be to forcibly stop the devil, destroying it if necessary, and freeing the captives. If that isn't possible, well, you aren't responsible for other people doing bad things. It's only not helping when you could've that could be construed as evil - not when you're helpless to prevent the wrongdoing.

Starscream
2010-05-13, 09:21 PM
I actually experimented with strengthening the paladin class by having them automatically gain this template slowly over the course of ten levels. After that I figured that like most primarily melee types, they would PrC out.

Worked pretty good, actually. Brought them up at least a tier. Don't know what I'd do if someone wanted to play a paladin 20, spreading the template features out over 20 levels would make them pretty meaningless in the long run.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 09:35 PM
Actually, being tortured to death would not. An exalted character can control his own actions and choices. He is not responsible for the actions of the half-devil, and those actions would not cost him his exalted status.
If she's not responsible for the actions of the half-devil killing her friends in front of her, is she responsible for the actions of the torturers who continue to torment their victims after she heals them? All she's doing is healing, even if the net result is more pain.

But either path has forseeable evil consequences of her actions, either way causes some tangible evil in the world, and either way she has to participate in it somehow, even if her participation is just saying "no".

(And no, she very thoroughly didn't have the option of trying to overpower the Half-Devil, either before or after the deal. It wasn't even on the radar of possible options.)

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 09:39 PM
(And no, she very thoroughly didn't have the option of trying to overpower the Half-Devil, either before or after the deal. It wasn't even on the radar of possible options.)

Of course it was. She might've failed, but that's called martyrdom.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 09:41 PM
Of course it was. She might've failed, but that's called martyrdom.
Healer class, Vow of Peace. She literally had nothing more deadly than a +4(1d4) unarmed strike, at level 10.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 10:02 PM
Healer class, Vow of Peace. She literally had nothing more deadly than a +4(1d4) unarmed strike, at level 10.

1) Agree to heal them. Walk 20 feet away and walk back - if your Calm Emotions takes effect, you win. If you are unable to walk that far or it doesn't work, go to 2.

2) Activate your double-strength Magic Circle against Evil and use your holy touch attack to do nonlethal damage and try to take the fiend down. If your DM rules that you can't do this, go to 3.

3) Heal your friends, then try to (a) free one or loosen his bonds, or (b) grapple the fiend. Even if he loses, he cant keep you under wraps and torture your friends at the same time. Meanwhile, they keep making their Escape Artist checks now that they are conscious.

Vow of Peace != be a doormat.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 10:23 PM
1) Agree to heal them. Walk 20 feet away and walk back - if your Calm Emotions takes effect, you win. If you are unable to walk that far or it doesn't work, go to 2.

2) Activate your double-strength Magic Circle against Evil and use your holy touch attack to do nonlethal damage and try to take the fiend down. If your DM rules that you can't do this, go to 3.

3) Heal your friends, then try to (a) free one or loosen his bonds, or (b) grapple the fiend. Even if he loses, he cant keep you under wraps and torture your friends at the same time. Meanwhile, they keep making their Escape Artist checks now that they are conscious.

Vow of Peace != be a doormat.
There was a miniature army there, so #1's out since I couldn't affect them all. As such, there were more than enough bruisers to physically restrain my Healer from unarmed strike/grapple. I did manage to heal the friends, but they were just NPCs and rather useless. The only other PC present, actually, was the Half-Fiend, who had joined the bad guys back when he was just a Changeling and was now coordinating plot development with the DM.

I'm fully aware of the options VoPeace gives, and that it's considerably less restrictive than most people generally think. Sometimes, though, there's nothing you can do in a particular scene. That goes for most characters really. I wouldn't call it railroading, since there were significant RP options available, but I don't think there was any way to beat them there, or even just to make myself enough of a threat for them to kill me. About my best chance for "suicide by cop" would have been to insult their mothers, I think. And knowing the Half-Fiend, I doubt it would have worked. No, sometimes you just have to work with the choices available, regardless of your character.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 10:42 PM
More parameters, huh? But this stood out to me.


The only other PC present, actually, was the Half-Fiend, who had joined the bad guys back when he was just a Changeling and was now coordinating plot development with the DM.
***
No, sometimes you just have to work with the choices available, regardless of your character.

No, you don't. When your DM and other players conspire to railroad you into breaking your vows with no way out, you shouldn't be working with them at all. You should be on the couch asking them when they're ready to actually play an interactive game. :smallannoyed:

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 10:53 PM
More parameters, huh? But this stood out to me.



No, you don't. When your DM and other players conspire to railroad you into breaking your vows with no way out, you shouldn't be working with them at all. You should be on the couch asking them when they're ready to actually play an interactive game. :smallannoyed:
It wasn't the intent at the time. Actually, out of game we'd all pretty much agreed that we wanted my character to get captured by the devils in some way, I knew that was in the works and had signed off on it, we just hadn't discussed details. And I didn't see her agreeing to help in that way as evil, for the reasons discussed earlier (to wit: her duty is to the person she's healing, and isn't responsible for the actions of the torturers). It only developed later that the DM realised she wasn't comfortable with my Saint-in-training helping in that way, even with her NPC friends being held hostage somewhere. We worked it out though.

MountainKing
2010-05-13, 10:55 PM
If he does then he didn't read BoED, as the book itself tells him not to do that.

...Since when is a good DM constrained to only doing what a book tells them to do? Isn't that kind of the point of the situation being a moral quandrary? I would think that such a thing would be desirable for a roleplayer... I mean, that's what the game's supposed to be about, isn't it?

Myself, I'd much rather see a player with Saint than a player with VoP, on the grounds of "horrifying broken potential"... and as a DM, I rather like giving my players moral quandraries to struggle with.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 11:00 PM
...Since when is a good DM constrained to only doing what a book tells them to do? Isn't that kind of the point of the situation being a moral quandrary? I would think that such a thing would be desirable for a roleplayer... I mean, that's what the game's supposed to be about, isn't it?

I'm not opposed to "moral quandaries," and neither is BoED. Please read my post again.

I'm opposed to lose-lose situations.


The DM should never set out to punish a character for taking the Vow of Peace feat. For the DM to pronounce one session, “A gnat got through the strainer in your drinking water this morning, you swallowed it, and now you need an atonement,” is simply capricious and unnecessarily antagonistic to the player. The DM and the players should all work together to ensure that a character with Vow of Peace contributes something to the game so that everyone can enjoy it more. It is okay to put a pacifist character in a situation where refusing to fight is a difficult (but still viable) option, but not to take away the choice entirely.

Emphasis added.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 11:04 PM
I'm not opposed to "moral quandaries," and neither is BoED. Please read my post again.

I'm opposed to lose-lose situations.
Oh yes, definitely. It was an oversight on the part of the DM that basically railroaded me into a lose-lose situation. Once we'd realized that and talked it through, we managed to work things out in a way that worked for everyone and led to some awesome RP. It eventually ended in tears, of course, but I'm totally satisfied with the direction it ended up going and there was an awesome quasi-martyrdom moment in there that made it all worthwhile.

Anyway, the whole point of the example was that sometimes lose-lose quandaries are accidental.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 11:10 PM
Anyway, the whole point of the example was that sometimes lose-lose quandaries are accidental.

And I'm fine with that, so long as the players and DM talk it through (like you did) once that fact comes to light.

But the fact that you all had to discuss it OOC does not count as "working with the choices available, regardless of character." You rightfully recognized those choices as untenable and compromised to change them.

sonofzeal
2010-05-13, 11:20 PM
And I'm fine with that, so long as the players and DM talk it through (like you did) once that fact comes to light.

But the fact that you all had to discuss it OOC does not count as "working with the choices available, regardless of character." You rightfully recognized those choices as untenable and compromised to change them.
There's usually limits on the options available to you, depending on the campaign and your character. Sometimes you'll have more choices than others. I think that's just a fact of life. Railroading isn't generally an all-or-nothing thing, it's a matter of degrees between "world-shaping freedom" and "go left". In this case, it was pretty certain I'd be going with the devils, but I had a good deal of freedom in how exactly that went, and got to negotiate my contract with them. It was certainly on the low end of the choice-o-meter, but I've had plenty of flexibility before and since so I don't think it's unacceptable or anything. I'd expect most characters in RP-heavy games to have occasional similar moments where there's reduced freedom. As long as there's still some choice, and such moments aren't overly-common, I think it's a normal part of the game.

Optimystik
2010-05-13, 11:53 PM
"Help your friends and fall, don't help them and still fall, and any other actions automatically fail due to the army of mooks on standby" isn't "reduced freedom," though. It's the choice being torn away from you by a vindictive DM.

Regardless, you talked your way out of it successfully, so no need for me to rehash it.

PlzBreakMyCmpAn
2010-05-14, 02:25 PM
unsolvable ethical dilemmas at you.my 2c is to take a unique approach. Decisions are not binary.

Icewraith
2010-05-16, 12:38 AM
It's pretty damn powerful, so don't let your player have it unless they've been RPing excellently.

Long story spoilered for length.

One of mine asked me about the template and the gist of what I told her is this: "your character qualifies for most of this, but in one of the next sessions you will have to make a choice. She will have the opportunity to sacrifice herself for the safety of others. The party will have about one day of in-game-time to rescue her and if they don't make it she will end up permadead."

Later, this player agreed to the BBEG's demand for one of their souls in order to prevent him from blowing up a major Sunite temple with an artifact that automatically raised its victims as undead. He had been big on destroying temples before, but this was the first time he had offered an alternative. So he cast trap the soul and she failed her save, and he left (They had figured out he was LE). This was bigger than the party knew since the temple was actually built to contain a really big evil of some sort (at epic they later found out the Temple was containing an Atropal and the wards were going to fail) and the blast would have released it.

So the other PCs had to start making knowledge checks to figure out what the hell was going on and where the BBEG went, when they realized that the BBEG actually wanted the soul of a high-level good aligned person. This gave them the clue they needed to make better specified knowledge checks (I'm researching evil rituals requiring the use of a good soul, I need results now, I'm dragooning every apprentice I can find and then teleporting us to candlekeep...)

In the meantime my player bumped a previous character up to one level lower than the soul-trapped character and introduced her sister, who the party contacted, performed a good number of divinations with some great RP, (well **** we don't want to waste eight hours to rest, but we could pop over to magic mart and pay through the nose for a scroll of contact other plane, we've still got most of our combat spells...) and then the party teleported off to the tower full of advanced Frost Giants where they faced off against the BBEG and his minions, and successfully engaged and killed the high priestess performing the ritual before it could be completed. The BBEG's artifact contingent teleported him at 20% health (PCs had run into this before, but were too busy staying alive and stopping the ritual to get dimensional achor off, and dimensional locking the place would have killed them had things gone badly since they wouldn't have been able to run) but aside from that it was a glorious victory!

So they rescued the PC and as a reward for her previous exemplary service and then sacrificing herself to protect the major temple (and not releasing the abomination that was actually that god's accidental dirty little secret), the PC was raised to sainthood after being rezzed. Instead of gaining new class levels she spent the next few encounters 1 ecl ahead of the rest of the party (LA is +2 but the rest of the party leveled), frantically trying to grind out more exp so she could get her exp total up to her ecl, past it and start burning off the levels.

So in the end the player got the template she wanted, everyone got one of the better (and certainly one of the higher tension) adventures I've run, and I don't think I've had anyone ask me about saint since, although if anyone does as good a job as she did on her character I'm sure nobody would object.


The main thing about the template is it can make a high CHA character nigh-unkillable by certain normally lethal effects.

Anyways the point is, the template is awesome and the abilities are pretty amazing, the +2 ecl is enough to mess up the character's progression until they get to buy it off without significantly down-powering the character in the long run (assuming buyoff rules), and as long as you make sure the character has worked hard in the past and does something significant enough to justify the template as a reward, then it is something to consider rewarding the character with. Also remember that Saint then becomes a defining feature of the character and is something for the character to continue to live up to.