Yes please
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Blogposting:
A problem I've realized while doing the new maneuvers for the original 9 disciplines is: Desert Wind doesn't really have a defined combat style, other than "I deal fire damage". It makes some gestures at mobility, but other than that one great counter all its attempts at mobility are pretty limp -- and how exactly does mobility synergize with fire damage anyway?
That's why the rush maneuvers Garryl did for that discipline are good, because they tie those two themes together (you move and as you move you strip people of fire resistance). But I'm still left wondering what a Desert Wind specialist's role is.
Let's make Desert Wind be a sort of 4e style controller. Fire effects provide area damage, wind effects provide battlefield control (blowing people apart, creating wind barriers, etc) and of course these two things can combine. And the mobility helps you be where you need to be on the battlefield to do this, since most of these effects are melee triggered.
Ugh. I typed up the class and lost it. That took me most of the day. *Sigh*
I'll try again soon.
Fortunately it was easy to locate the fonts they used in the books. Trying to figure out the formatting...it looks like the books may not even have used textboxes which would certainly lighten the workload. Double column 12pt celestia antiqua fits about 900 words per page of full text, which is good but it will be significantly less due to headers, pictures and maneuver formatting. So yes the pagecount is going to be pretty high but we knew that. A little trimming may be necessary to prevent it from being hellishly unwieldy. But as long as it's visually broken up, in contrast to stuff like Dicefreaks' Gates of Hell, it's not a huge problem.
I admit it's kind of charming to see some of this stuff in semi-official looking fonts though.
In order to create the martial bladeforms (specialized disciplines of the battlemind) I started listing all disciplines, and their associated abilities, power, tactics...and Im not sure about everything, so I'd be glad if you could help me fill the blank things.
White raven - Charisma, leadership, charges, tactics
Shadow hand - sneaking, teleportation, shadows
Diamond mind - mental focus, precise strikes with lots of damage, something else?
Setting sun - battlefield control through forced movement, using the enemy's power against him
Desert wind - high mobility, fire and blasting effects
Stone dragon - Sturdiness, battlefield control, Unbreakable object/unstoppable force theme
Devoted spirit - self buff, heals, resiliency, something more?
Iron heart - Swordsmanship, I guess...? Really need help on that one
Tiger claw - multi attacking, feral strikes - Sacrificing defense for offense
Disclaimer: all abilities will have much cooler names in the next version, this is just a draft
The abilities I was thinking of giving them -
Base chassis/progression is maneuvers and PP progression, no powers (but see below). I consider giving them Discplines/maneuvers in a similar manner to the ardent's mantles, but not sure yet.
3/4 BaB, good will and perhaps ref saves
Martial bladeform - you choose a discipline in the beginning, and it gives you the focus for the rest of the class. You gain a blade that is shaped like one of the discipline's weapons.
Throughout the levels, you gain -
Discipline manifestation, a set of passive abilities related to your discpline that are active for as long as you have psionic focus, and are in a stance from your chosen discipline
Granted powers - a small amount of psionic powers related to the discpline's "theme" that you may prepare and use like martial maneuvers.
Augmentation - you may use PP to augment a maneuver. You can either give it a "general augmentation" (Boost attack/damage/DC/whatever) or a "Specialized augmentation" which gives the maneuver a boost related to the discpline you are specialized in)
Battlemind superiority - the capstone, not sure what to do with that, probably some form of a "psionic super stance"
In addition to these main abilities, I plan on the following support abilities:
Battleburn - a limited amount of times per encounter, you may "waste" a prepared maneuver and gain a number of temporary PP equal to the maneuver's level.
Bonus feats - not sure if needed, but if Ill need to fill levels they are a good way to do so.
Recovery mechanic - something related to expanding psionic focus, perhaps also releasing a burst of discipline related energy/effect in the process.
What do you guys think? I'd really appreciate any feedback and/or help with the discpline themes/tactics list
Thanks in advance!
Seems right. Notes:
Desert Wind - battlefield control (wind), area damage (fire), mobility. The wind and fire effects should be things that emit from you or are triggered from where you are, so that it's important to have mobility to get to the right place.
Devoted Spirit - Remember this is the crusader tank discipline, with aggro stuff like iron guard's glare and thicket of blades. It should have more of that stuff.
Diamond Mind - In BO9S this was just kind of the "all the good stuff" discipline, let's focus it on three things: counters, strikes requiring Concentration checks, and finally, forms of tactical control that have yourself at the center, rather than being about affecting enemies primarily. For example, I added a "Mind as Prism" counter that lets you redirect mind-affecting spells or be used as a prism to use certain touch spells at range.
Iron Heart - just cool warblade shenanigans.
Tiger Claw - let's focus more on the general "primal, heedless, bestial rage" theme than on TWF (not that TWF support is bad). A crazy 2h barbarian should be able to specialize in this disc just as well as a twf ranger.
White Raven - should be better the more martials are in your party. Would be nice to add something specifically to help archers too (though not a stance, that's too big of an investment, though it might be good to have a "Lead from Behind" stance for people who are themselves archers or support. I'll do that one.
Stone Dragon vs Devoted Spirit - I'd like these to have alternate tanking styles, with SD trying to physically interpose themselves between allies and enemies and pushing/bashing enemies away -- active tanking -- while DS has a more passive tanking that penalizes opponents for trying to attack anyone but them or get through (as with iron guard's glare and thicket of blades), with their active tanking portion being about self-heals.
Formatting maneuvers:
https://i.imgur.com/FXmoiLw.png
TOB uses the bottom arrangement, actually with an even heavier indent, but I feel like the lowercase might be easier on the eyes. Opinions?
So, In short
DW - controller-esque, with fire and wind centred on self+ mobility
Devoted spirit - aggro/passive tanking and some divine flavor
Diamond mind - concentration, counters, centered on self, "smart discipline"
Tiger claw - wild and careless fighting
Stone dragon - active tanking, lots of bullrushing/tripping, making yourself the barrier
I'd like some more explnation of iron heart since I can't think of a unifying mechanichal theme
Just general "weaponmaster" stuff. It's also the discipline where you'd have flat, no questions asked pluses to hit, damage, and AC. Diamond is fast and alert, Stone is bashy, Tiger is crazy, and Iron is just like generic ultimate sword skill. Cool combat and weapon stunts.
I like the ability name battleburn by the way. Sounds cool yet easy to use in play.
Ok
I'd try to create a list of psionic powers related to each discipline (probably 5 of levels 1-5) that would be greanted at an appropriate times to the Battlemind, perhaps with a choice of two powers each time.
Ill post the table here when it's complete, along with some other interesting stuff.
Im also now considering the augmentation ability to have two sides - either to augment a power with a "martial" bonus, or a maneuver with a "psionic" one
The TOB variant soulborn, which I'm probably posting later today, is all about empowering maneuvers with essentia, so for the sake of distinction I would leave that to incarnum -- especially because essentia and maneuvers synchronize better because they aren't based on per-day mechanics the way psionic classes are.
Plus you already have battleburn as a way to spend ppoints in combat. So I recommend cutting the augmentation part and just focusing on having the augmentation effects of your new psipowers be useful for an initiator.
If you think I should focus more on power usage, than I might give them actual psionic progression?
Otherwise, it might be too limited...
Edit-like, currently, they get like 5 powers or something...but Im afraid more than that is game breaking with the maneuvers
Edit 2- actually the plan was to waste maneuvers in order to gain PP, but I guess I could revise it into something else (perhaps make them waste PP for the active part of the manifestation)
I just don't think the all-day, as-much-as-you-want maneuver system harmonizes particularly well with a daily store of power points, if we're talking about using pp to empower maneuvers. Spending maneuvers to gain power points, on the other hand, is a great system because it increases compatibility between these two modes, but of course has a lot of potential to be OP especially with multiclassing so you would need to pull it off right.
Another possibility is getting pp by hitting an enemy with a strike or something.
Have you looked at this psionic TOB discipline?
Yeah, I saw the discipline.
Point is, that if we focus so much on the power point side, and then only give them little amount of powers...
I think I'll make the transition back into a prc. Give up PP, and focus on blade progression, psi-focus mechanics, and a few powers that can be prepared as maneuvers
Either way is fine. A PRC is less work I'm sure than drawing up a bunch of new powers. If PRC, I would throw in a thing of it advancing your mind blade for soulknives.
Alright, moment of truth:
To parchment background or not to parchment background?
(This isn't a real page just an example.)
https://i.imgur.com/MyBkwnv.png
There is one problem this raises: A lot of the images I'd like to use are big square blocks, which look absolutely hideous if placed against a naturalistic background like this.
This is another "I'm not dead yet!" post. I am PLANNING to send a PM asking for some of my old threads to be unlocked so I can repost them with fixed tables and such.[EDIT^2]Reposted but tables not fixed. (made one visible where it wasn't before)[/EDIT^2] This would include Falling Anvil.
Don't know if Desert Wind has "Wind" as a theme in ToB, but you could add it I think. My initial gut reaction to BFC was "sounds off-theme", and with the flames from say, Salamander's Charge not persisting, I can't see it having that theme, but changing that would be easy I guess? I almost feel like Stone Dragon emulating Wall of Stone would be more thematic (defense) than Desert Wind emulating Wall of Fire.
My condolences... :smalleek:
Are you thinking of physically printing this?
If so, I need to PM you about a charity project I am working on an could use anything you learn about getting a good print (especially in the area of durability).
If not, remember that electrons are basically free, where-as paper, binding, and full-color ink cost money.
EDIT:
1.) Rest of the AoE Stone Dragon "charge up for ambush etc" maneuvers posted. It has been long enough since I wrote them and I posted them so quickly (so as not to get bitten by procrastination again) that I don't know if they are properly edited. A double-check would be especially useful.
2.) Got Falling Anvil thread unlocked (along with some other threads not related to this project).Hopefully I will get that copy-pasted over to a new thread fairly quickly.[EDIT^2] Copy Paste and making visible a broken version of a small, but very important table done[/EDIT^2] Once the copy-over of all the threads is done, I will make editing Falling Anvil the priority among them.
Does anyone happen to remember if there were any other locked threads that ARE relevant to this project that I wanted to copy over to fix tables and such?
Oh, god no. No, the length concern is just about where a variety bag of contents becomes a big mush. We're a little bit over the line right now but not so much.
Not that I know. I'd lean towards posting things anew anyway.Quote:
Does anyone happen to remember if there were any other locked threads that ARE relevant to this project that I wanted to copy over to fix tables and such?
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Any feelings on parchment background texture vs plain white background?
The example above with how the different elements look isn't final by any means, it could be made to look better (better table color, thicker top text), and that awkward composition wouldn't be used. Here's how I see the con vs pro:
- Con: Could look amateurish/sloppy/cluttered/harder to read; limits the color palette; strongly restricts the kinds of illustrations that can be used, and many others will need crop jobs; more work in general.
- Pro: could look nicer/feel more real.
Here's how a table would look on white:
IMHO:
Assuming it is easy enough to change later and cropping is also not hard: Go with parchment for now.
If hard to change, play it safe and go with plain white.
Note to self: Edit links in my extended signature to account for re-posts. Maybe include links in reposts to appropriate sections of comment threads for things that started out as contest entries... and, of course, fix the tables.
If you're still accepting homebrew for this, I have a class that may fit called the Ascetic. Its essentially a hybrid caster/initiator base class that was meant to be a more playable Healer.
Could be good since it adds an initiator with a new party role. A while ago I posted this pacifist discipline -- could it be a good fit? Changes are certainly possible. (And probably req'd for balance in any case, never edited it.)
I haven't posted this incarnum crossover stuff (class/discipline/feats) because of certain finicky questions.
For example, does the dynamic of investing essentia into maneuvers to empower them actually work well? Presumably the tension here is centered on swift actions -- reinvesting essentia to max out the maneuvers you're about to use, vs using boosts and counters. Boosts, unlike counters, are in direct competition vs reinvesting, so the boosts have to be made especially powerful or no one in this class would take them.
Then there's the class's refresh mechanic. A refresh action that lets you reinvest your essentia as part of that action sounds good, but by letting you reinvest along with refreshing, you remove any gameplay/planning reward for not reinvesting in between when a maneuver is used up and when you refresh. That indicates that a swift action refresh to put refresh and reinvest in direct competition would be a good idea, but then a swift action refresh could be unbalanced from a combat perspective and puts even more pressure on the counters and boosts.
So it's just finicky.
There's one question that has stopped me from posting the soulborn redo too. Full meldshaping plus initiating (albeit limited to the one incarnum discipline) is too complicated for a single class and spreads their essentia too thin (though it does provide a source of competition for essentia with maneuvers that could deincentivize the strategy of just maxing out the essentia capacity of whatever maneuvers you're about to use). So I limited their normal meldshaping to a single unique blademeld slot. But it feels inelegant to retcon their meld access when there are soulborn-only soulmelds in MOI, so I just don't know. I guess I'll post what I have and solicit PEACH.
The errata and FAQ are both done though.
well that stuff is always to finicky but there is incarmum tome of battle cross over class and discipline on the shores you guys never threat called rajah and radiant dawn on pathfinder i am gonna post link to spheres wiki for both of them
rajah class
radiant dawn discipline
Incarnum crossover stuff. Would appreciate help balancing this and making it work well, though I know there's a bunch there to read.
*Pops in*
Huh... Nice to see this project being revived.
Can't wait to see it finished after nearly a decade now. :smallbiggrin:
I wanted to have it ready for the 10 year anniversary which will be Dec 6, but that's unlikely now since I have much less time for this stuff than when I started the thread (basically underestimated the workload). May post the plain white "beta" documents on Dec 6 though.
Misc note -- as cool as Pair O'Dice's Abyss and Hell disciplines are, considering instead using Dread Crown to represent both planes, since the Good planes all only get Golden Saint. It saves effort on making legacy weps and on converting Dread Crown to an epic discipline. Not sure.